


There Are Easier Ways To Kill Yourself, You Know

by forest_hime



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, Heathers AU, kind of, so if you dont want to see them get needlessly mean, the losers club are the heathers turned up to eleven, then uh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-02-01 08:41:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12701352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forest_hime/pseuds/forest_hime
Summary: George Denbrough didn't have friends; he had his brother.And, unfortunately, everyone in Derry knew that Bill Denbrough would never die.





	1. The Beginning of the End

**Author's Note:**

> For such an overall downer of a story, I'm having a lot of fun writing this. I think I just really like cartoonishly vindictive popular kids. There's a special kind of comedy in taking High School this seriously. On a different note, the Veronica and JD brand characters of this story don’t share a romantic arc in this. Just in case anyone starts getting uncomfortably wary of where this is all headed. It’s just keeping to the same idea of blindly following someone you don’t actually know but think highly of.  
> Also, I know I was making some executive artistic decisions in changing the age difference between Bill and Georgie so they could reasonably be in high school at the same time.

               As far as shitty days went, this one was alright. It was quiet in the upscale suburban neighborhood, the only sound coming from the light twitter of birds somewhere high above the lawn. George thought he could see them from where he stood, and he felt himself smile. An actual, genuine smile. Maybe the day could still be salvaged. He was abruptly ripped from the moment as a deafening _THWACK_ rang out over the yard. It was immediately followed by an even louder crash that sounded an awful lot like a wooden ball violently smashing into something solid, and winning. George kept his eyes on the birds, defiantly, until they began ruffling their feathers against the noise and did something he wished he could do right then – shot the fuck away from there. He sighed at the same time someone let out a loud, delighted laugh.  
               “ _FUCK_! They don’t teach you shit like that.”  
               George finally tore his eyes away from the now empty sky and let them drop to the small gang of teenagers clogging up his mother’s garden. His attention went to the source of the noise first – Richie. The older boy had his hand up, shielding his eyes from the sun as he admired the now wholly demolished pile of marble that had, up until ten seconds ago, been a statue. One of the largest pieces on the property. It had been an original, maybe; something expensive and big. It wasn’t much more than a shattered torso now. George had to admit, for a single shot, the damage was impressive – or it was a testament to how much his parents’ art dealer was fucking them over.  
               “No, you Neanderthal, they don’t,” Eddie’s shrill voice rang across to Richie. “What’s the point of your mooncrater glasses if you still can’t see for shit? What were you aiming at?”  
               Richie turned to him, and his destruction-fueled smile widened. “Your head.”  
               Another burst of laughter sounded off to Georgie’s right. It was Beverly, her croquet mallet carelessly resting behind her head and across her shoulders. “God, his aim was flawless then,” she said. “He saw abnormally large and blindingly pasty and he just swung.” She doubled over in laughter again, Richie joining her this time. She was laughing much harder than the situation called for, probably a result of her quick run to the bathroom ten minutes earlier, where she’d come back slightly red-eyed and giggling. If there’d ever been a time when she cared about this game, it was long gone now. Stan, who had so far kept almost predatorially quiet as he watched them like they were some low-grade reality TV, seemed to be the only other person to notice. He'd just rolled his eyes and went on with his turn.  
               Eddie scowled at Beverly, who was still laughing. “Fuck you.”  
               She wiped her eye, trying to compose herself. “You know, as fun as that’d be, I don’t think I’m your type, slut shorts.”  
               Richie let out another obnoxious laugh. Eddie’s eyes flared, as they predictably did every time they fell into this same argument, and he opened his mouth to retort, but a voice cut him off.  
               “For f-f-fuck’s sake, can we move this a-al-along?”  
               Everyone’s attention turned to the only presence casting a wider shadow than any of the statues in the ornate garden. Bill, George’s older brother, was rather dramatically standing above them on the house’s raised lanai. He’d lit a cigarette at some point and took a long, steady drag off of it, letting the moment sit. Then he descended the few steps down to the lawn and walked to an open space waiting for him just between George and Stan. He didn’t give his younger brother so much as a passing look before raising his mallet and hitting it into the back of George’s knee – not with any substantial force, but enough to make George’s scrawny leg buckle. George let out a surprised yelp. “Your turn,” Bill said. “Go.”  
               “What? But he didn’t even—”  
               Everyone’s attention was on George now, and he lost whatever he’d been about to say. He hated this fucking game. Taking a breath, he hefted the mallet up and onto his shoulder and stepped toward the field of multicolored balls, stopping when he came up to the green one. He quickly glanced between the faces of the others around him, still feeling the burn of their eyes on his skin. Ben, standing off to the side and doing a wonderful imitation of the background, seemed to be the only one of them who was capable of actual human emotions other than just some variation of annoyed or high. He gave George a flicker of a sympathetic smile – that George almost returned, but it came out incredibly insincere.  
               “Today, Georgie,” Bill drawled.  
               George’s face flushed. Everyone stopped calling him by his childhood nickname around the same time he’d stopped being a child. Well, they _had_ stopped. It happened to came back into fashion as soon as George had finally gained purchase in Bill’s social hierarchy. The name ensured the boy knew his place. It was also fitting, in a way. Georgie would’ve given anything to be where George was now.  
                He glanced at Ben again, who was now watching as Richie started picking through the pieces of the statue still left intact on the ground. George liked Ben well enough. They’d formed a silent sort of camaraderie over the last few weeks, bound by their mutual low standing in the hierarchy of the popular kids, and by their unconventional manner of admittance that had allowed them a place at all.  
               George was only in his brother’s group (of friends? He still hadn’t figured it out, and was honestly leaning more towards sacrificial cult held together solely through the dark powers of Hell than any emotional attachment to each other) because Bill had said so. He’d given no explanation and no other choice. Whether he liked it or not, the moment George hit his freshman year of high school, he was already sitting at the top.  
               And he had liked it. He had liked it very much.  
               If Bill had ingrained anything in his younger brother over the years, it was that either you were a somebody or you were nothing. Bill was giving George a chance to not only be a somebody, but be one of _the_ somebodies. More than that, he was asking George to be a somebody with him. George could’ve been asked a million times back then, and a million times he would’ve chosen Bill.  
               Ben, on the other hand, didn’t have the luxury of having his social status inherited over to him like a family heirloom. It could be said that Ben was in the group of his own volition, but that would never be true. Not really. George never knew Ben before finding himself integrated into the group, so he only learned the story of it secondhand and in pieces. But knowing all of them as he did now, George didn’t need to be told. He knew how they worked. He knew what they did to people.  
               Ben had always been the Fat Kid. No matter his accomplishments or hobbies, he was never allowed to be known for anything else. He had been far from the only fat kid in their school growing up, but he was one of the only ones forced to wear it like a crown of thorns. And if anyone put the effort in, they could’ve traced it all back to a single source. George could picture it clearly in his mind, the look of complete helplessness on a nine-year-old Ben’s face as the kids who would one day call themselves the elite of society form around him, sensing weakness and looking to feed.  
               And there in the middle of them all would be Bill. He wouldn’t say anything; even at a young age, he’d already perfected his art. Never saying a word, he still made the natural order of things exceedingly clear— you were nothing to the universe and he was everything. You were going to die one day, and he’d be there to watch. Because there was no God and Bill Denbrough would never die.  
               At first, when they were still young, they made it physical. Ben still held a scar on his arm from the time Richie, eleven and angry, had thrown a large rock exceptionally hard at the other boy as he was leaving the library. Eddie was right there with him, laughing until blood was drawn, then he gagged and said he’d had enough, which had been the only thing to keep the situation from escalating more than it had.  
               “Don’t look so proud of yourself, dorkus,” Ben heard Eddie saying as they left. “It’s like hitting the broad side of a barn.”    
               By middle school, Bill and those who followed him had finally realized their preordained calling as the school’s apex predators. Ben started losing the weight, and once he did, he kept it off. Obsessively. It seemed to be the only thing he could think about sometimes. The bullying died off, but slowly, being replaced by a kind of admiration from the rest of the student body. Ben was meeting new people now, making friends and holding himself with the hint of a confidence waiting to bloom. He had a natural charm to him, and after all those years, other students were starting to notice. Bill and his group hung back as they watched Ben’s social status start to climb all on its own. He was becoming somebody. Bill knew immediately that he had to cut it off at the pass, but instead of bringing Ben down a few pegs, they’d bring him in. Make him and his newfound status useful.  
               So they laid it on thick. Everything they’d ever told him, every last lie and deep-seeded insult they’d ever planted, they brought it all back with a screaming vengeance. Softly, subtly they stripped away who he was becoming and turned him back into that terrified nine-year-old. Then they brought in the one thing they had now that they didn’t have before. They had Beverly Marsh.  
               She coddled Ben, sympathized with him, and told him he could still be salvaged in time. She used nice words and her heartbreakingly beautiful smile to draw him in and kick his last leg of self-preservation right out from under him. She helped him accept that, yes, he was broken and wrong. Even now, after everything he’d tried to do to hide who he was, he was still some kind of inhuman monster. He needed them, and they were generous enough to let him in.  
               The doors to the elite had been opened to Ben, and like a outcast looking for sanctuary, he’d walked through. His standing would always feel tenuous and his place on the hierarchy nearly nonexistent, but come hell or high water he did everything in his power to stay. The same people who had ripped him apart with their bare teeth, pushed him as close to the edge as a person could possibly stand without tumbling over – leaving him grasping and clawing at the cliff face and looking for some shred of salvation from himself – and he practically groveled to them, wide-eyed, like they were holy deities and he wasn’t worthy. It was fucking incredible.  
               Standing there now in the middle of them as they continued to play this stupid game, Beverly pulling out what had to be her fourth cigarette of the hour and listening to the deafening sound of Eddie threatening to tear Richie’s dick off If he didn’t stop prodding people with the statue’s dismembered arm, George wondered if Ben was any closer to seeing what was really behind the glamorous masks of the cool kids. The ones who seemed to have the laws of the universe tailored specifically to them. He glanced at the small pile of ruble at Richie’s feet and frowned. Everything was broken here.  
               “For the love of Christ, do something, you little shit,” Beverly shouted, drawing his disgruntled expression to her now. In his peripheral, he saw Stan lean over and whisper something in Bill’s ear. After a moment, Bill smirked.  
               Like a trigger, George hit the small wooden ball – hard. Hard enough to pull another delighted laugh out of Richie as they watched it soar off in the same directions the birds had flown just a few minutes earlier. It cleared the fence before finally falling out of sight. George hadn’t meant to hit it that hard, but _God_ he’d be hard-pressed to regret it.  
               Bill watched where it had fallen, frowning vaguely. “Georgie, you waste.”  
               George surprised himself again and snickered.


	2. Old Friends

               It was fifteen minutes to noon and George Denbrough’s seat in biology was conspicuously empty. As it always was the last half of the class, if he ever bothered to show up at all, which today he hadn’t. If the teacher noticed, he never once made any indication of it. He just waved George off whenever he inevitably asked to go to the bathroom or the nurse’s office or wherever he said he was going this time.  
               In truth, he always went to the same spot. The first floor of the western staircase. The bathrooms on that side were always broken and there was only one classroom that anyone would have to pass him to get to, the old drama room. But even that had been closed off all year, mostly due to the giant, gaping hole that had suddenly caved into the classroom floor over the summer. The staff claimed they’d had multiple building inspectors out before opening the school’s doors for the year, but somehow George doubted they had time to cover much ground and had just let everyone in anyway, liabilities be damned. He could respect the sentiment. Sometimes he wanted to the Earth to swallow the entire student body whole, too.  
               He heard the light clicking of heels on tile somewhere down the hallway and pushed himself further onto the staircase, hiding himself until the sound passed. He hated this part of the day. He felt like a criminal on the run, and it was anxiety inducing at worst, tiring at best. He wasn’t a habitual class skipper and had never purposefully skipped a class in his life before this year. At least now that he found himself doing it on a daily basis, it was only for one class, and he knew he wouldn’t get any flack for it. If anything, he was much more worried about the repercussions he’d get for sticking around the whole period.  
               The biology teacher, Mr. Toran, was a small, shaky kind of guy. He cycled through three ties of varying degrees of gaudy and talked to you like you were simple and really should know all the class material already. He made jokes that weren’t funny, and were rarely in good taste, but he laughed at himself anyway. He wasn’t exactly pleasant, but he wasn’t unbearable either. Not to George at least, not at first. He’d had his share of terrible, off-color teachers in the past, and he’d learned how to weed out the actual lesson behind their barrage of whitenoise.  
               But from the start, something was clearly wrong. The first day of school, Toran had run through the list of names on the roll call at an even pace, waiting only long enough for a student to respond before moving on. He took a breath to read the next name, then paused. He looked up from the clipboard and at the classroom.  
               “George Denbrough.” He’d said _Denbrough_ , slowly, almost like a dare.  
               George hesitated, then warily raised his hand. “Uh, here.”  
               Mr. Toran’s eyes fell on him, his face unreadable. There was an uncomfortable moment of silence before he spoke again. “As in Bill Denbrough?”  
               There was a slight stir in the room at the name. George, barely a day old hatchling in his newly held status of school royalty, was still in awe over the tangible reaction Bill’s name never failed to bring out of people. He felt a bit of an egoistic swell of pride. “Yeah. He’s my brother,” he said. “Is that…a problem?”  
               “I was about to ask you the same thing.”  
               George stared at him in surprise. He opened his mouth once like he was going to speak, but he didn’t know what that statement meant, nonetheless how to respond. His brain tried to reach for something, but Mr. Toran had already moved on to the next name on the list. The rest of the class played out like some kind of weird fever dream. Toran discounted George’s presence entirely. George thought he was probably just being paranoid at first, but it just became awkward when he was the only one to raise his hand or offer and answer, and Toran acted like no one had said a single thing. George persisted, the confusing nature of the whole situation just spurring him on harder until he could find some sort of explanation. When Toran finally gave in and acknowledged George’s presence, George immediately wished he hadn’t. He spun every one of George’s answers as if they’d been said by a complete moron, even if he got it right. George stopped trying to say anything.    
               After the actual longest hour of his life, the bell rang for lunch, and George all but ran from the classroom. He ducked into the nearest bathroom and locked himself in one of stalls. He needed a second to breathe. Collect himself. He had no idea what the fuck just happened, but it had been unbelievably humiliating and a little unbearable. He’d never had a teacher dislike him before, nonetheless one that seemed to actually detest him. The rest of the year in that class started playing out in front of him on a reel and he didn’t think he’d be able to stand it.  
               _As in Bill Denbrough?_  
               He needed to talk to Bill.  
               When neither Bill nor any of his friends could be found in the cafeteria, George wasted ten minutes scouring the still unfamiliar school. He eventually went in a circle and ended up back at the cafeteria. Stan was there now, standing next to a table of randos and jotting things down on his clipboard every time they said something to him.  
               When George approached him, Stan neither looked at George nor let him finish his question before curtly saying, “Gym.”  
               George blinked. “What?”  
               “They’re in the gym.” Stan continued writing out a particularly wordy response he’d just gotten, and George found himself staring at the clipboard, weirdly fascinated by Stan’s almost unnaturally elegant cursive scrawl. He didn’t know what it was all for, but the page was full of it. It reminded George of the swirling font on the gold-emblazoned wedding invitations his parents sometimes received from some rich socialite or another. When Stan had finished, he looked at George still standing there and raised his eyebrows, as if to say “Do you fucking need something?”  
               George hadn’t realized he’d been staring. “Sorry, uh, where’s the gym?”  
               “The school only has two buildings,” Stan said flatly. “If it’s not in this one, where could it possibly be.”  
               George felt his face heat up. Everyone always said high school would be hard, but no one told him it’d make him feel so consistently…small and stupid. “Oh, right. Yeah. Thanks.”  
               Stan just rolled his eyes and carried on to the next lunch table. George hurried out the way he came, tripping over a stray chair in the process and hating himself a little more.    
               By the time he found the gym, his nerves were fried and he nearly forgot why he’d been looking for it in the first place. He slowly pushed himself through one of the big swinging doors. Like Stan had said, the gang was all here, sitting in an uneven semicircle on the raised bleachers. All of them, save for Eddie, were smoking, as George had quickly learned was their usual way of things. He hated cigarettes, but he was willing to live with it in light of who was on the other end of them. He started to approach, then stopped, a sudden fear gripping his limbs.  
               Looking at them then, they were kind of beautiful. Limned in the dusty light of the gym’s frosted windows, a thin cloud of their own smoke hanging over them like a morning fog. Bill was above them, as he always was. Quietly observing. Beverly’s head was tipped back as she let more smoke curl out from her mouth, shifting out of Bill’s shadow just enough to let the light catch the fire in her hair. Richie and Eddie were across from her, Richie leaned back with his arms propped on the bleacher behind him and his hair in more of a carefree mess than usual. Eddie and Beverly were having a back and forth of some kind, then Eddie said something and the quiet in the room was shattered by everyone’s laughter. There was something eerie in the echo that bounced back across the empty basketball court.  
               The idea of just walking up to them, joining their circle like he had any right to be there, was so foreign and unthinkable. He was still waiting for the moment when they’d decide they’d had enough and would drop him entirely. He’d had his chance to prove himself; what had he done with it?  
               They hadn’t noticed George walk in. He could still leave if he really wanted to. He didn’t know what excuse he’d have for never showing up, especially now that Stan had explicitly pointed him in their direction, but his nerves were so on edge, he was about willing to chance it and come up with something later, on the spot. About that time, Richie’s voice shot out across the room. “GEORGIE? GEORGIE! BUDDY! PAL! WHAT TIMING. YOU CAN BACK ME UP. THE HOMELESS DUDE WITH THE LIMP LOOKS LIKE HE COULD GIVE WICKED HEAD, RIGHT?”  
               The entire time he was screaming across the court, Eddie was screaming equally as loudly for him to shut the fuck up. Beverly shoved her boot at Richie, but she only succeeded in pushing him over onto Eddie. Eddie immediately bristled and shoved him off.  
               “Aw, c’mon,” Richie said. “Give the guy a nickel, guarantee he’ll blow the blue right off your balls. Might get the stick out of your ass while he’s down there.”  
               Eddie curled his upper lip. “You’re fucking disgusting.”  
               George finally approached while they were all arguing, glad to have the focus anywhere else. He had to climb pretty far up the steps before he reached them. Bill had long left their conversation by this point and was looking out at nothing in particular, taking another drag off his cigarette.  
               “T-t-took you l-long enough,” he said as George finally reached them.  
               George shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you don’t tell me where you are.”  
               “Keep up.”  
               They fell into silence, letting the sound of the other three fill the empty space.  
               “Did something happen with you and Mr. Toran?” George asked after a while.  
               Bill made no reaction. He was quiet for so long that George thought he just wasn’t going to answer.  
               “W-who the fuck is th-that?” Bill said finally.  
               George couldn’t tell if he was joking. It was a small school in a small town. Even George knew most of the teachers just from growing up in the area. “The…biology teacher?”  
               Bill still made no reaction.  
               “Kind of short, balding. He’s wearing this gross-looking kaleidoscope tie. I mean, he definitely seemed to know you, and he was being a major asshole for no—”  
               Something like recognition passed over Bill’s face and he let out an honest to God laugh. “H-him? He’s s-s-still here?”  
               “Who?” Richie asked. They’d gotten the others’ attention.  
               “Toran.” Bill said his name like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.  
               Richie raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I thought he ganked himself.”  
               Eddie frowned. “He’d be better off.”  
               George looked between them. There was a weird foreboding settling in his chest. “Why? What happened?”  
               Bill’s eyes fixed on the wall across from them on the other side of the gym and he jerked his head towards it once. George followed his gaze but didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking at. There was a line of banners loudly proclaiming different years they’d won one big game or another. The biggest banner in the middle had their school’s name and mascot.  
               “The banner?” he asked.  
               “Behind it.”  
               George looked at the wall and he saw something now. It was faint and had clearly been painted over once. It was hard to tell with the banner covering the majority of it, but it looked like graffiti done in large red letters.  
               “ _They taste better young, Ron_ ,” Beverly recited, tipping her head back again to let out another cloud of smoke. George noticed with little surprised that she had a badly rolled blunt in her hands. “He outted Richie for cheating on a final, so we outted him for cheating on his wife with a college girl.”  
               Richie smiled giddily. “We changed the sign out in front of the school, too. You should’ve seen what we did to the halls.”  
               “And the cafeteria,” Eddie added, rather tonelessly. He picked something off his pants, seeming bored by the whole conversation now.  
               “Hey, Eds,” Richie said.  
               Eddie looked up at him, his expression saying he was expecting something stupid. He was immediately met by a cloud of smoke in his face. Eddie screamed and stumbled back off the bench.  
               Richie bursted out laughing. “Geez. Don’t be such a spazz.” Even though this had clearly been the reaction he was hoping for.  
               “GET BENT, DICKNOSE.” Eddie started gagging, like he was purging the contaminated air from his lungs. “If I get cancer, I’ll remember this.”  
               “Right, the point-two seconds you got smoke in your face is really going to twist you up more that the rest of the time you’re hotboxing over here.”  
               “He did try to kill himself, you know.” The voice startled George and he turned to where Ben was sitting on the bench just below Beverly. He’d completely forgotten he was here. “Mr. Toran,” Ben continued. “Remember? He was gone the rest of that year and the year after. And most of last year. He was back as a sub for a while, but I think he needed the money from fulltime. I heard he’s close with the head of the school board, so they were just going to sweep it all under the rug.”  
               Bill stubbed his cigarette out on the metal bench. “That’s r-real fucking f-f-fascinating.”  
               Beverly snickered, and Ben looked away, embarrassed.  
               “Probably the one making those kids go missing,” Richie said. “That’s the real reason he was gone so long.”  
               Beverly looked at him like he was an idiot. “They just started disappearing, like, three months ago. Why would he be stupid enough to put himself back around kids if he’s the one snagging them?”  
               “Exactly. Who’d a thought.”    
               George barely registered any of their conversation. The sense of foreboding in his chest had swelled into complete horror. They’d brought a man to the brink of suicide, and then forgot about him entirely. George had known for years that Bill and his group worked on a different plane of existence from the rest of them -- he’d known it before he even had the vocabulary to contextualize it. But he’d never imagined just how far removed that plane was. Looking at them now, making jokes, as unmoved and unaffected by the world at large as they ever were, he was terrified.  
               “Even if he didn’t, we can just spin it like he did if his head starts getting too big,” Richie said. “That class will be an easy A.”  
               George was having trouble finding his voice. “No. I don’t want—”  
               He was cut off by the sound of the heavy gym door swinging open on its squeaking hinges with much more assured confidence than George had opened them with. Stan walked in, his shoes the only sound echoing through the room. He held up his clipboard as he got closer. “Lunch poll.”  
               Eddie was on his feet and hurried over to the railing. He leaned down through the bars that an average sized person would’ve had trouble fitting through and reached his hand out. “Let me see it. I was fucking right, wasn’t I? Most of them said that flavored mineral water shit.”  
               “If half the school is defective, sure,” Beverly shouted over to him.  
               Stan ignored Eddie’s hand and noticeably slowed down out of spite as he made his way up the stairs to join them, Eddie whining in protest.  
               George had no idea what they were talking about. From what he could gather, it was a survey they made up every day, and today’s question had been something stupid Beverly and Eddie were arguing about. It was clear that the previous conversation about Mr. Toran was dead and gone, and so was George’s interest in whatever they were saying now. He was starting to feel a bit like he’d been so excited to be allowed into the elite clubhouse, he hadn’t heard the door lock behind him on the way in.  
  
              It was just over a month into the school year when George found himself once again sitting on that staircase fifteen minutes to noon, finally letting his guard drop as the sound of high heels faded down a separate hallway. One of the women from the front office probably. They definitely would've had something to say if they'd found him loitering there like some degenerate punk. After a moment, when the sound had receded entirely and he had made sure there was nothing immediately taking its place, George opened his book again to the page he'd closed on finger. He'd been there long enough to finish all the homework from his previous class periods and didn't have much else to do than read.   
               He’d hear more footsteps in the hallway every so often, students going to the office or bathroom. It had been a few minutes when that familiar stepping sound started coming down the hallways again. He didn’t think anything of it. But then they started getting closer. Too close. He looked up from his book in time to hear the footsteps stop beside him.  
               "George?"  
               The person sounded surprised. He looked up and found Dorsey Corcoran of all people standing a foot away.  
               "Oh, hey," George said. "What are you doing here?"  
               Dorsey shrugged. “Looking for somewhere away from everything. What about you? Don't tell me you're ditching just to come over here and read."  
               "Uh, alright." George glanced down at his book. "I won't tell you that."  
               An amused smirk passed over Dorsey's face, but he seemed distracted and it fell away quickly. An awkward silence followed it. George’s eyes fell to the heavy jacket the other boy was wearing even in this heat. He grimaced a little. Everyone knew what the Corcoran brothers went through at home. Even if they didn't know the details, it only took two working eyes and half a brain to see that these kids were usually battered to shit in one way or another. It'd been like that for as long as George could remember, as much a fixture to the backdrop of the town as the Standpipe. It had been treated so normally George's whole life, it wasn't until recently that it'd fully hit him how fucked up the whole thing was. The realization had come with the added baggage that George was one of the few who really did have the details. Enough of them at least.   
               Dorsey had told him, back when they were kids. Back when they could have almost been called friends. They'd shared a bond over comics and cartoons and a bunch of other nerd stuff George hadn't thought about in years -- as far as he'd tell anyone who asked. Dorsey's older brother, Eddie (the normal-sized, comparatively less aggressive Eddie of the school), had been the one to introduce them to the works of Tony Greer, an indie comic book writer who quickly became George's undisputed favorite. Even ten years later, George still felt a pang of excitement any time he happened onto the name at a bookstore or thrift shop. He and Dorsey and a select few others in their class would spend all their time before school and at lunch trading comics and discussing them at length with the exact analytical depth that could be expected from six-year-olds. George remembered his brother's opinion having very little priority back then. He had much more pressing matters at hand, like the story his group of baby nerds had started brainstorming for their own comic. It was simple and stupid and one of the best things George had ever been a part of. His fondest memory was the time he'd come up with a twist for the villain of their story and Dorsey told him he was going to be as good as Tony Greer one day. George thought that might be all he ever wanted.  
               Then Dorsey nearly died, and everything changed. George had been the only one Dorsey had told the truth to. Even the police hadn't been able to pry it from his still cut and bleeding lips. Dorsey's step-father, Richard, had come home in a drunken rage, as he sometimes did. But something exacerbated him and his interminable anger that night. He had taken a hammer to the back of Dorsey's head, so hard Dorsey didn't wake up fully for another three days. He'd been medically dead for just over a full minute the first night in the hospital. That he'd survived at all was nothing but pure chance. The incident finally spurred on a full investigation from the town police, but that was the last George had ever heard of it. Richard Macklin had given some halfassed story about the whole thing being an accident, and George never heard of him facing charges or that anything suspicious had come up in the investigation. The whole thing was dropped. Just as quickly as it had appeared, the incident disappeared from the town's consciousness, and Dorsey himself withdrew with it.  
               The whole group fell apart almost overnight after that, first Dorsey and then the rest of them. In a way, it felt like it was the town correcting itself. Dorsey Corcoran was reminded of his place in Derry's balanced ecosystem and not to start getting too brave. And George was reminded that he wasn't meant to have friends or else bad things would happen. He already had his brother.  
               This was the first time he and Dorsey had actively acknowledged each other since then, and the tangible awareness of it clung thickly in the air.    
               "You wanna sit or something?" George asked. "You don't look like you're in much of a hurry to catch the last minute of class."  
               Dorsey hesitated. "Your brother or his cronies here somewhere?"  
               "Cronies?" George snorted a laugh. "No. I don't know where those wastoids are, but it's sure as hell not here."  
               Dorsey managed a slight, uncertain smile, then sat on the step next to George. “While you’re here…” He pulled his backpack onto his lap and started to dig through it. "Were you the one who liked comics? I feel like it was you, but I don't remember."  
               "That was probably me, yeah," he said, carefully, unsure if Dorsey was being serious.  
               "Cool. Alright, so, check this. It's this new series, right, but I think you'll recognize the guy who made it." He pulled a thin comic in a wrinkled plastic insert out of his bag and handed it over.  
               George's eyes widened as he took in the cover. "Holy shit." It was the first issue of a series he'd never heard of before, the illustration in a style he wouldn't have recognized, but he would've known the name at the bottom anywhere. He couldn't believe it. Greer had been out of the writing business for almost five years now -- and yet here he was.  
               He turned to Dorsey, who had the same look of genuine excitement on his face. "Right?" He said something else, but it was drowned out by the sound of the lunch bell ringing out above them. Within seconds, students flooded the hall, filling it with noise. Dorsey moved back farther on the step to let foot traffic pass through. "He just dropped it on everyone last month," he continued. "I don't know how much you follow it. A few indie mags had been saying he had a special announcement for weeks, but they never made one. Just released the goddamn thing."   
               "Holy shit," George said again, looking down at the cover. He hadn't read a comic in ages and he felt a little rebellious just holding it. He wanted to read the whole thing right there, fucking popular kids be damned, and was about to ask if he could when, as if on cue, something collided against the side of George's arm with enough force to shove his entire upperbody forward. He had to push his hair back out of his face to glare up at the boy standing over him. "What's your fucking damage, Stan?"  
               Stan's response was a blank, apathetic stare. His eyes briefly flicked over to Dorsey, but seemed to disregard him immediately. "Bill's asking for you," he said.  
               "You had to kick me to tell me that?"  
               Stan ignored him. "Come on. He's waiting."  
               George huffed, then looked from Stan to Dorsey. Dorsey had moved even further back on the stairs, looking at Stan like a cornered wild dog waiting for any reason to bite. It was a common look from the lower grade population of the school.  
               “I’m really sorry,” George muttered, and started pulling all of his stuff together. “It was cool seeing you.”  
               Dorsey’s mouth was a tight line. “Yeah.”  
                He gave Dorsey one last apologetic look, not sure what else he could do, then quietly followed Stan into the crowded hallway.   
               Stan had gotten a head start, and George jogged a little to catch up. "What does he want?"  
               "You mean other than the fact that you're supposed to meet up with us as soon as the bell rings?"  
               George refused to deign that with a response.  
               "There's someone he wants you to say hi to," Stan said.  
               "What?”  
               "Just walk."     
               George followed close behind Stan's clipped pace as they crossed the building, and he spent the walk reasonably worried about what could be waiting for him. Bill didn't just pull people out of the air for the sake of small talk. They approached the propped open cafeteria doors, and any of George's questions were immediately squelched from his mind.   
               He saw the group of them first. They were sitting at their usual table in the center of the room, the table that was, by every unwritten law of the school, theirs and theirs alone. You didn't sit at the populars' table during lunch anymore than you'd sit on a king's throne during court. Your head would end up in the same state either way. But then again, even kings had old traditions and morals to uphold when ringing a man to his death. Certain dignities they were expected to entertain. This was a lawless land, and anyone of the kids at that table would sooner force your own shit down your throat while everyone watched before they'd ever let you die a dignified death for your transgressions.   
               As such, it was incredibly disorienting to find the tables usual occupants there, plus one interloper. George's feet stopped him cold on the spot.  
               "Oh, God, no," he groaned.  
               It had to have been nearly three years, but he'd still know Mike Hanlon's face anywhere. It held the distinct honor of being a face he'd prayed to never have to see again.   
               Stan didn't wait for him -- as far as he was concerned, his delivery boy duty was complete. He made his way to the center table, walking straight through the room as other students hurried to let him pass. His approach caught Bill's attention, which then slid to his brother still standing in the doorway. Bill jerked his towards them once, and George found he had no choice but to comply, his feet once again working separate from him. That was just the way with Bill -- you didn't say no, because you couldn't.  
               Bill didn't offer any kind of greeting at George's approach, just gestured to the boy beside him. "You r-r-remember--"  
               "Mike," George finished dryly. "Yeah."  
               Mike gave him a wolfish smile. "Been a while, kid. You still a chickenshit?"  
               George had really hoped he’d be allowed this one reprieve from his past.  
               Mike’s family lived and worked off of one of the farms outside of town, so he'd gone to some other school outside of their district. Bill met him at a party his freshman year, and George didn't know the exact details after that, just that Mike had melded into Bill's group so seamlessly you would've thought he'd been there all along. It was a testament to the kind of person he was. Back when George held his brother's group on some kind of pedestal where they could do not wrong, he still didn't like Mike.  
               Bill become strange when Mike was around. Different. He became more talkative even though his stutter became incrementally worse. More than that, he almost had a sense of humor, or a twisted version that could pass for one. Watching them together years ago, and even a little now, George could've sworn Mike was the first person to ever win Bill's respect. Bill never tried when interacting with other people; he never had to. He didn't care what their opinions were, because he knew his place among them. He knew he was their better. But when Mike was there, something changed. It was almost like Bill started to care what someone else thought -- almost like he was actively working to impress him.   
               This, George discovered, was when his brother was at his worst.  
               Bill mostly ignored George while growing up, but Mike seemed to find the potential in his existence. He picked on the kid every time they happened to cross paths, making up shit to scare his young mind. Once, Mike had found out about the time George had gotten himself trapped in a storm drain for two days. George had been a stupid six-year-old and went running out into a record breaking rainstorm. He'd been mad at Bill, but he couldn't remember why now. Something about a boat. Regardless, he'd gone outside and wandered into one of the most flooded sections of the neighborhood. It had been as quick as turning a corner and suddenly he had water up past his knees. He only remembered the incident in brief flashes from there. He turned to go back, but his foot slipped out from under him. Every time he tried to stand, the water only seemed to grow stronger and deeper, forcibly pushing him towards the storm drain. He had been only just too big to cleanly fit through the slit in the curb, but only just. Looking at it, he wouldn't have thought he could fit at all, but it seemed almost wider now, slowly stretching itself to envelope him. There was a brief second when he felt his back hit the solid concrete and he had a place to push off from where he could have saved himself, but the water again pushed his legs out from under him and into the drain, leaving him to dangle. Within seconds, he lost his weak grip on the curb and the rest of him slid through. He landed squarely on his arm and spent the next two days down there with the bone fractured and throbbing.   
               He had to wait out the night before the flooded tunnels had calmed enough for him to move through them. He spent hours clinging to a rusted pipe that his flailing arms had happened to strike against. He closed his eyes against everything that whacked and scrapped against him as it passed him through the water. The whole thing felt like a surrealist nightmare, and more the once he felt himself on the verge of passing out.  _Things_ , living, squirming things, hit against his shoe at one point and he could feel them moving up onto his leg and across his skin. He screamed and cried and frantically tried kicking them off or scrapping at them with his other shoeless foot, but then another would come along. And another. He never learned what they were. He'd managed to get them all off by the time the water started to recede. But he never forgot the sensation of them. He'd spend the next few years waking up screaming and desperately rubbing at his arms and legs, the phantom impression of the creatures on his skin following him from his nightmares.  
               He'd wandered the underground tunnel for what felt like days, none of it making sense. He'd make a right turn, walk forward a few steps, then turn around to find the tunnel he could have sworn he'd turned down from wasn't there anymore. He thought he was losing his mind. His doctor later said it was probably due to the mild concussion he'd also sustained.   
               He developed a phobia of a lot of different things after that -- most notably, anything that slithered or had a slimy texture to it.   
               The day Mike had found out about this, he put a handful of lizards in George's bed, and when George came running out of his room in a dead panic, screaming, he was met by the group of them waiting for him in the living room, laughing.  
               The worst part by far was when Bill threw a rubber, toy lizard at George, who violently jerked back and fell onto the tiled floor. "You m-missed one, Georgie."  
               Bill had never used the experience against George like this before. He'd never exactly been a source of comfort, but he'd always maintained a kind of quiet respectfulness about the subject. Never bringing it up; never taking advantage of George's newfound skittishness in that area.   
               But now he was laughing right in George's face. They all were, except for Ben, who just looked uncomfortable but didn't say anything. Looking back, it had clearly been all of them at fault, but all George could think at the moment, humiliated and crying while he laid on the cold, hard floor, was that it was all Mike. If Mike hadn't been there, this wouldn't have happened. He'd been glad when Mike had been busted for carrying marijuana on school property, and his parents sent him out of state. It had actually been Richie's pot, but for some reason Mike was willing to take the heat for it anyway. He and Richie had always been weirdly close, too.  
               Looking at him now, sitting there in the middle of them, George felt the familiar panicked sensation that always came with the memory of the storm drain rising in him again, like Mike himself had become a trigger.  
               "Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in jail for disrupting general peace or first degree something by now?" George asked.   
               Mike's smile tightened. "No. But I can move some things around if you're looking to change that."  
               "Don't murder my b-brother," Bill said. "My parents w-w-would be ins-s-sufferable."  
               Mike seemed unimpressed. "So...what, is this a thing now?" he asked, gesturing his fork at George. "When'd this become a thing?"  
               "Bill's getting old," Richie cut in from down the table. "He needs an heir to carry on his old fogey legacy."  
               Bill flipped him off.   
               Stan, who'd been talking to Eddie about something on the clipboard again, stopped what he was doing mid-sentence and turned to Bill, horrorstruck. "You can't be serious," he said. "That can't be what this is about, is it?"  
               Bill shrugged. "Why not?"  
               Stan leaned forward on the table, his hands braced on the edges. " _George_ of all people?"  
               "Still right here," George said.  
               "We already t-t-talked about this," Bill said.  
               "Not about  _this."_ Stan jabbed his pencil towards George's general direction.  
               Bill looked away from their table, as though he were carefully choosing his words, and made eye-contact a girl a few tables down. The girl sputtered out whatever she'd been drinking all over her tray, but she hardly seemed to notice. "Holy shit, did you see that?" George could hear her squealing to her friends from here. "Denbrough totally just looked right at me. I swear."  
               He turned back to Stan. "H-he's the only one it c-c-can be, and y-you know it."  
               "It makes sense," Ben's voice quietly added in. Stan cut a glare at him, and Ben shrunk back, but he continued anyway. "I mean, it's not like it'd take that much for the power to change over. People wouldn't need convincing. Everyone already sees Bill when they look at George." Where everyone else had been ignoring George as they talked about him, Ben seemed almost too aware and was specifically not meeting his eyes.  
               Richie on the other hand squinted at George dramatically behind his glasses. "Oh, Jesus, I see it. That's rough. But, hey, muzzle tof or whatever. You're inheriting a goddamn kingdom."  
               Both Stan and George glowered at him. Stan went back to his clipboard, deciding this conversation had had more than enough of his attention.   
               "A kingdom of shit," Eddie said. He emphasized his statement by flicking his eyes from one side of the cafeteria to the other, a distinct look of disgust on his face. The look fell on the tray in front of Ben and Eddie scrunched his eyebrows together. "Geez, carbo-load. You know bread makes you fat, right?"  
Ben blinked, surprised, but the conversation moved on before he had a chance to say anything. That was Eddie's way; in and out. Planting something small just under your skin, then leaving it to fester on its own.  
               "What if I don't want your fucking kingdom?" George said.  
               "Then you're the most impressive liar in the school." Stan looked up at him. "Congratulations, you really do meet all the position qualifications for ruler of shit kingdom."  
               Bill looked like he had something to say to this, but Stan had already pushed back his chair and stood. He suddenly whapped Eddie on the back of the head.  
               " _What the fuck_?!" Eddie's carrying voice caused whatever heads weren't already turned their way to look.  
               "Shut up. You came up with this stupid poll question, I'm making you be the one to read it outloud."  
               Eddie rubbed at the back of his head. "Just say that, you goddamn psycho."  
               George and Bill watched them both go -- and Richie, too, apparently, as he waited until they were half-way across the room before yelling at Eddie that his skirt had hiked up to his ass. Eddie wasn't wearing a skirt, but he pulled down at the hem of his shorts anyway, scowling at Richie all the while. George had had enough of awkwardly standing there, finally conceding to himself that he wasn't winning any battle for the moral high ground by refusing to sit with them. He took the seat next to his brother.  
               "Do any of your friends even like each other?" he asked.  
               Bill didn't respond right away. He was still watching Stan and Eddie where they'd approached a table and were starting the recital of their asinine poll. There was a strange, almost derisive look in Bill's expression that George couldn't read.  
               "That's a s-st-stupid question."


	3. Kids these days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for homophobia and slurs related thereto  
> Maybe one day I'll get past the first 15 mins of the movie

               Whenever it was decided that after-school activities would take place at someone’s house, it was always the Denbrough’s by default. Other than being the largest and most aesthetically pleasing of all their houses – Sharon Denbrough had gone through a French nouveau phase a few years earlier after coming back from a gallery opening in Paris and their house’s interior never recovered, the living room more resembling a sterile museum exhibit than a livable space – it was the only one they _could_ stay in.  
               Richie’s house was such a dump that a third of the group refused to go anywhere near it, Sonia Kaspbrak’s all-seeing gargoyle-like presence made Eddie’s house unbearable, Mike lived too far away, Bev’s father wouldn’t allow them within ten feet, and Ben’s house was too small. There wasn’t anything wrong with Stan’s house, he just didn’t want them there. One or two at a time, maybe, but never all of them en masse. Especially never Richie – not after last time.  
                Before, in George’s pre-high school days, them taking over meant an entire afternoon of George being barred from his own house. If their parents were home, Bill couldn’t do much more than ban George from the living room, but those nights were almost luxuries. More often than not, the Denbroughs became conveniently busy when they realized their house was about to be full of teenagers. On those nights, George was forcibly holed up in his room, hiding away where the lame little brothers belonged – unless he could escape out the front door in time, in which case he was just stuck outside now. He only tried that the once, and they’d refused to let him back in until his parents finally came home around eleven.    
               Once, when he was thirteen, George had had enough. It was nine at night, and he was going stir-crazy. He’d been debating his plan for the better half of an hour, his reasonable side, which also doubled as his traumatically terrified of heights side, telling him it was a bad idea. His impulse-driven side was also telling him it was a bad idea, but to do it anyway. He’d been stuck in his room for over four hours, and he was at a point where it was either face his fear and be irresponsibly impulsive, or say “fuck it” and storm right down the stairs and into the forbidden zone. He could probably get away with stepping into their space, too. They’d be so surprised to see him grow some balls, they wouldn’t have time to react before he walked right out the front door. It’d be worth getting locked out again just for the look on their faces.  
               In the end, the door to his room stayed untouched as he climbed out his bedroom window and onto the second-floor roof. A quiet stream of “Ohfuckohfuckohfuck” hissed out under his breath as he went. A steady wind whipped against his face the second he left the protection of the walls. It wasn’t strong by any means, but significant enough to totter a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound kid on a slanted roof. He just had to get to the ladder on the other side of the house. Their dad always kept the ladder propped there, saying half of his lack of motivation to take the holiday lights down came from having to lug the ladder over. It was March, and the holiday lights were still up, but that was hardly the point right now.   
               George had never been out on their roof before, though he’d thought about it multiple times in a romanticized kind of way. People in books had their most important conversations on roofs. But roofs also came with the increased likelihood of falling, and he’d done enough of that not to chance it before now. He was surprised by how rough and grainy the dark tiles were. It took precisely two seconds of trying to cautiously shuffle over them to realize his first mistake. The traction on his shoes was working a little too well on this texture, often catching him in place. He couldn’t slide like he’d wanted to; he had to stand and walk.   
               That was his second mistake. He was considering taking his shoes off entirely when the thought was punctuated by his sole catching once more. He’d been using too much force going forward and tripped. He rolled until the solidity of the roof disappeared out from under him and he was in a sheer drop to the ground. His heart nearly shot straight through his throat. He’d expected himself to relive that fall into the sewer drain, but he hadn’t had the time. In the span of a gasp, his back slammed against the grass and all the air expelled from his lungs. He was too preoccupied with relearning how to breathe to process anything else, but thinking back on it later, he was pretty sure he heard Eddie scream.  
               Bev, Richie, Eddie, and Mike had been on the back patio passing around one of Mrs. Denbrough’s old bottles of wine when a child fell from the sky and landed on the lawn in front of them with an audible thud. From where they sat a few feet away, only vaguely able to see him in the dark but not bothering to get any closer and check, they’d assumed he was dead. They called for Bill so he could be the source of responsibility and tell them what to do now. Then George started to wheeze. His eyes were open but unfocused as he kept on gasping like a fish.  
               George’s vision took a second to come back to him, and even then it was two minutes of swimming black spots. His back and arms throbbed dully, and he pictured them mangled and snapped in a hundred different ways, the adrenaline still mercifully blocking out the worst of the still oncoming pain.   
               When his vision finally cleared, he was met by a half circle of faces looming over him. The light from the house cast an unearthly contour over their features. It was a striking image against the unusually clear night sky behind them.  
               _Have there always been that many stars above Derry?  
_                Bill’s was the first face George registered and the incentive his senses needed to come snapping back to him. He saw himself and the moment from outside his body, how he must have looked. A stupid, inferior child who had stumbled into a place he’d never belong. A familiar fear clouded his unfortunately still firmly planted heart. The fear of being inadequate to the one person who mattered.  
               But when he saw George’s eyes come back into focus, Bill just frowned. “There are e-e-easier ways to k-kill yourself, you know.”  
               It seemed to break the weird tension in the air, and someone started to laugh. Then the rest of them lost themselves to it, too. George thought he must have hit his head again, because he could not make sense of what was happening.  
                    Beverly reached down and gripped George’s arm, and hauled him to his shaky feet. “Jesus, squirt, that was the spookiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. I thought we were gonna have to hide a body.”  
               “I’m sorry.” George’s voice came out in a rasp. He felt nauseated and weak and really wanted to go back to lying down in the dirt.   
               “Sorry? Are you kidding?” Richie came over and unceremoniously fell onto Beverly’s shoulder hard enough to make her stagger. “That was a riot. I’m gonna start throwing myself off buildings.” He was leaning on Beverly like she was the only thing keeping him from face planting into the dirt himself. And judging by the smell coming off of him, she most likely was.   
               Beverly patted Richie’s arm, smiling serenely. “Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.”  
               Laughter still tittered out from the others like hiccups. They were visibly lethargic and clumsy, talking louder than necessary about things that barely made sense. As the dull ache started to fade to the back of George’s consciousness and he’d established all of his bones were intact, he started to really look at those around him now. There was an inelegance, a careless throwing away of the self that George had never seen on them before, and it was absolutely fascinating. It wasn’t his first time seeing a person shit-faced –their dad was prone to it on Thursday nights especially – but this wasn’t the same. This was a wall breaking down. They were just a group of kids fucking around and being irresponsible with their parents’ alcohol.  
                When Mike threw a can of beer at George’s face, which he’d barely managed to catch, George stared down at the lukewarm can, and then up at the rest of them. It was both a challenge and an invitation. He looked to Bill, fully expecting a glare of disapproval and jerk of his head to send George scurrying back to his room. But Bill just shrugged like he couldn’t be bothered, then he headed back towards the house. Stan wasn’t too far behind. The rest of them cheered when thirteen-year-old George cracked the can open and started downing it like a seasoned pro; they cheered again when he threw all of it right back up. The aftertaste was vile, but their drunken laughter was contagious, and he started catching it, too.    
               He couldn’t remember much else after that. He’d never drank before, other than communion or the few times his mother had let him sip at her wine after she’d had a bit too much herself, so it didn’t take much to blow the roof off his tolerance limit. He remembered disjointed conversations and fuzzy mental snapshots of moments that could’ve been real or just convincing alcohol-induced imitations.   
               There was one moment in particular that his mind kept trailing him back to. It was a vague mental image of a lop-sided origami ship that may or may not have existed. He didn’t know why it would have been there, or even when, and he couldn’t find it anywhere in their house afterwards. The memory of it nagged at him like an incessant bird. He remembered his head feeling immeasurably heavy as he leaned it on the back of the couch and watched Bill absently turning the paper creation in his hands. Maybe Bill had made it. He’d always had a knack for stuff like that.  
               “I don’t think a paper boat’s gonna make it very far,” George heard himself say.  
               “You d-d-don’t just put the paper s-s-straight in,” Bill said. “You h-have to apply a c-c-coat of p-paraffin.”  
               George scrunched his eyebrows together. “Of what?”  
               Bill might’ve smiled at the stupid question. George remembered something like that, but probably not. “It’s a t-t-type of wax,” Bill said.  
               “And then it floats?” George felt himself losing the battle against sleep, his eyelids falling closed.   
               “She.”  
               George’s eyes opened again, but barely. “What?”  
               Bill looked at him, and George faintly noted that something was different. This was the moment he knew his inebriated state had taken over his mind. It couldn’t be pinpointed to just one thing. It was everything. Everything was Bill, but wrong. His carelessly tousled hair, the heaviness of his eyelids, his slouched posture as he held this shoddily thrown together paper boat. It was Bill, but approachable and… finite. For the first time in George’s life, his brother looked real. He looked like someone George could picture himself staying up until two in the morning making terrible jokes with. Someone who’d say stupid things like “everything’s okay” even when it wasn’t, but George would believe him anyway. He looked like someone who’d make it okay.   
               Real or not, George still held a burned imprint of the image in his head the next morning. And the day after that, and the day after that. Real or not, it haunted him. It was the closest he’d ever come to having a brother, and as far as he knew, it never actually happened.                 
               “Y-you call boats sh-she, Georgie.”  
                 
\----------------  
  
               The last bell for the day had rung twenty minutes ago, and they were still standing in front of the school. Stan frowned down at his watch. Useless Loitering was not something he'd scheduled for.  
The sound of a few more straggling students appeared from the front door, and George turned to see if it was Bill or Richie. It wasn't, just three freshman girls talking and laughing among themselves.  
               "I'm guessing the night's off then. No point meeting up if Bill's not there, right?" George asked. He hoped he didn't sound as desperate as he felt. It had been almost three years since that night he fell off the roof, and standing there, surrounded by all of them again, a genuine part of the gang, George couldn’t help thinking how great locking himself in his room sounded. Just ten minutes of solitude would be nice. The plan for after school had been to meet up at the Denbroughs' and work on their various overlapping projects, assignments, and extracurricular responsibilities. Collectively, they represented nearly every club and extracurricular the school had to offer, and with the year finally in full swing, the inhuman workload that came with it was hitting them like a sudden torrential downpour.   
_Them_ being everyone but George. He still hadn't joined any clubs or teams or whatever. He'd considered a few -- creative writing, maybe -- but hadn't gotten around to it. Now he had Bill breathing down his neck, telling him to just pick something. Preferably something that fell out of the particular niches of the rest of the group and that they hadn’t picked clean yet.  
             Richie had chimed in then. “You know, like the East Asian Alliance, or the Jewish Student Athletes."  
               But at this point, their reach stretched so far, the list of spaces they didn't yet occupy was incredibly small and unappealing. So George made excuses and procrastinated, leaving him with nothing to do but blankly watch from the side as they overtook his house for things he had no part in. After the shitshow that went down today, he was in no mood to go through that again. He just wanted to take a nap.  
               "What does it matter if Bill's there?" Stan said. "They don't trust you with a house key?"  
               "That's not what I meant, asshole," George muttered.   
               "Then what? Believe it or not, we can exist as a functioning unit without Bill. And if you're really so worried about it, I guarantee he'd be pissed if we went off the plan."  
               "Stan's not wrong," Ben said.  
               "He's just running damage control. That's what happens when idiots act like idiots." Stan threw a pointed look at Eddie.   
               Eddie tensed. "Don't fucking look at me. I didn't tell Richie to pull that shit."  
               "You didn't help."  
               "Blow it out your ass, oh my god."  
               Stan looked at his watch again. "Mike, is your car fixed yet?"  
               Mike raised an eyebrow. "Depends. Is that your shitty way of asking to take my car?"  
               "I'm not asking." Stan started towards the parking lot without them, all of them just watching him go. Mike actually smirked. When they still hadn’t moved, Stan stopped and turned to them, throwing his arms out like he was asking what the fuck they were doing. "Come on! We're burning daylight, and I have shit to do."  
               Eddie's mouth pulled into a line. "I hope he gets hit by a bus."  
               "Wow, Toni Basil, that's not very pep of you," Beverly said. She and Mike busted out laughing at the look Eddie gave her, then the two of them followed after Stan into the parking lot.   
               Ben looked an awful lot like he was about to try and be reassuring to Eddie in some way. George had to stop him.  
               "C'mon, Ben, we might as well. Before I have to listen to them screeching at us."  
               Stan's voice shot out across the parking lot. "Are you waiting for a written invitation?"     
               Ben let out a tired laugh. "It was a nice thought.”  
               George glanced at Eddie, still unsure if he was someone they could shit talk the others in front of, but Eddie wasn't paying them any attention. He was looking back at the school's entrance. His entire countenance seemed more unstable than usual. As loud and reactionary as he came off, Eddie was surprisingly thick-skinned. George couldn't think of a time he'd seen something scratch him any deeper than the surface. But this was different. The incident with Richie had actually shaken him. When he finally looked away from the school, he found George watching him and bristled a little in surprise, like he'd been caught in some act. Eddie quickly ducked his head and followed after the rest of them to Mike's car.   
               George never thought it'd be possible for him to feel bad for Eddie of all people. If there was anyone Stan should be casting dispersions on for causing this whole mess, it was Bill and his insufferable, colonialist-like need to claim and conquer. Today, the school; tomorrow, the world. Or something. Whatever it was, Bill wasn't taking it lightly.   
               As it had been so far in their high school career, everyone’s responsibilities and workload had fallen within their respective interests, things they probably would’ve gravitated towards doing anyway, so they didn’t mind too much.    
               Richie usually spent their time after school running dumb ideas by everyone for headlines to put in between the other morning announcements. The front office typed out the script for him every morning, but it was a wonder why they still bothered. If any other student tried spewing out half the things Richie had gotten away with over the intercom every morning, they would’ve been kicked from the position within the first week, and probably given a detention for good measure. But Richie had held the spot of the school’s morning voice going on three years.   
               He was also the student lead of the theater and drama department, both in title and spirit. He got Bev in good with the costume department, and within a few weeks, she had become the lead, not strictly in title but wholly in spirit. She insisted on making most of the outfits herself and was quick to snap if someone tried to help. It was far too much work for one person, and more often than not she had to concede and give some of it over to the others in the department, but she made it clear she wasn’t happy about it.  
               She was technically the lead for prop and set design, too – because Richie had needed a name to put down – but really, that was Bill. Most people at school knew Bill at such a superficial level that they didn’t even know he had a stutter, nonetheless a penchant for art. If someone had told them that Bill Denbrough had hand drawn the large and much-too-intricately-detailed-for-a-high-school-play backdrops for last fall’s rendition of Death of a Salesman, they would’ve looked at that person like they’d just suggested big foot was real and he was in the audience.  
               Meanwhile, Stan had more going on than most of them could keep track of. George knew for a fact that he was in student council, NHS, JSU, Beta, the student newspaper, math honors, and debate – also SADD, which both confused George and worried him for the sake of the general public – but anything after that was up in the air. It seemed like every week someone was coming up with yet another club or organization Stan was supposedly a part of, most of which didn’t even sound real. Richie was incredibly insistent that Stan was in a bird-watching club, but that was neither confirmed nor denied.   
               Mike had only been at their school two weeks, but he had already well integrated himself. The school newspaper had been looking for a new photographer since the old one graduated last year, and Stan and Eddie put in Mike’s name immediately. And if they were putting in a name, it wasn’t a request. Mike also showed an interest in joining the robotics club, one of the few on the group’s list of untapped land, and took to French, which had been a visible relief for Bill. The only other person to take even a menial interest in another language was Stan, and that had only been because he was terrible at languages and needed it to help him get through the required foreign language credits. Ben once offered to help him with Spanish, but Stan had just stared him down until Ben backed off.  
               “Switch to French,” Mike had said when it was brought up, a brazen grin on his face. “I could cut you a discount for my private sessions.”  
               Stan gave him a withering look. “When I’m done deep throating a saw blade, I’ll call you.”  
               When Ben came along, Bill found the perfect place to push all the humanitarian organizations no one else wanted to bother with. Ben didn’t seem to mind. It helped his moral compass to do something good. He also started a previously nonexistent book club that met at the town library, and became the president of a civil engineering club, which could have also been previously nonexistent for all any of them knew. He was in student council and the school newspaper with Stan, Bill, and Eddie, and NHS with Stan.   
               Then there was Eddie.  
               Eddie had posed a unique challenge for Bill in that Eddie hated their disgusting, backwater school and the disgusting, backwater people in it. Stan managed to talk him into joining debate their junior year. He initially hated the idea, but it was the most bearable of his options. As it turned out, Eddie had a knack for arguing people down. Who knew. It had the added benefit of leveling him out for at least an hour afterwards.  
               He was in the school’s local chapter for Red Cross, to the staff’s great disdain. It was meant to be run by medically licensed professionals who would come in to teach students safety measures and health consciousness, but by day two, Eddie knew the material inside and out. He would spend more time correcting whatever they tried to teach than was spent actually teaching. It was mostly semantics, but any adult that tried to argue this point was quickly shut down and given direct, word for word quotes from the officially issued manual. Eddie had been prepared to take things into his own hands going in, fully expecting to deal with what passed for “licensed professionals” in this hick town. It amazed him that the whole of Derry hadn’t succumbed to dysentery already.     
               When senior year started, Bill told both Beverly and Eddie that they needed to expand their reach in the school. Neither of them wanted to, but he wouldn’t let it drop.   
               Bill kept insisting Bev join the cheerleading squad. Between him, Mike, and Ben, they covered nearly every sport the school offered. The cheerleaders, inarguably their largest opponents for gaining a complete monopoly of the school’s ruling class, were the only ones still out of their control. But Beverly barely let him finish his sentence before shutting him down. When he wouldn’t let up, she joined a conspiracy club out of spite. It ended up being one of the greatest decisions of her life. She’d never had a chance to see all the school’s bonafide nut cases up close and hear their hot takes of the day – her favorite so far was the werewolf someone claimed to have seen over on Neibolt.  
               Bev was always giddy after these meetings and immediately spilling everything she heard to the rest of the group. She barred any of them from joining – this was her thing and she wasn’t going to let them ruin the fun of it for her with their stupid shit.  
               While this was all well and good, the fact still remained that the cheerleaders sat outside their circle of influence, and Bill wouldn’t let it go. Richie eventually volunteered Eddie, if only to turn the tired conversation in a new direction. Eddie immediately snapped that he’d spend every second there telling all the cheerleaders explicit details about the vile, contagious diseases Richie was festering.  
               “They’d be pulling you out of class in a hazmat suit by Tuesday,” he said.  
               Richie shrugged. “Alright. You’re on.”  
               “That was a threat, you moron!”  
               “Not a good one.”  
               But Bill was studying Eddie now, and Eddie suddenly looked like he would’ve given anything to keep the next words from coming out of Bill’s mouth. “You could.”  
               “Bill.” There was an edge to Eddie’s tone, but that was as far as he was willing to go. In all the years they’d known each other, and that was a long goddamn time, Eddie had never defied Bill. It was commonly understood that whatever Bill wanted, Eddie wanted by default. It was also commonly understood that Eddie would sooner die than go against that. Bill understood this better than anyone.  
               “They’d l-l-let you in,” Bill said. “They l-love you.”  
               Stan was studying Eddie, too, his head slightly tilted to the side.  “They do think of you like some kind of adorable purse dog. And you’d be Derry’s first male cheerleader. They'd like the novelty of it.”  
              “I don't care what they'd fucking like,” Eddie hissed at him.   
              “You’re s-saying you w-won’t do it?” Bill asked.  
              "I didn't say..." Eddie couldn’t even look him in the eye. “Whatever. I don't care.”  
              “Mm. Well,” Beverly cut in, “if you’re gonna be a cheerleader, you’re gonna have to care a whole lot. That’s kind of their thing.”  
              Eddie looked so genuinely horrified at this, it was almost funny.  
              It was true that quite a few of the cheerleaders made it very loudly known that they thought Eddie was adorable. By his junior year, it had become such a problem that he couldn’t get them to leave. Bill wouldn’t let him tell them off, so they swarmed him like flies. But there was an unsaid, underlying belief in their group that he’d go to sign up, and the cheerleaders would just laugh, maybe pat him on the head, and send him back out. Eddie was already prepared to run out of the room the second they showed any push back.  
               The most surreal thing to come out of this was a conversation George had overheard between Eddie and Richie. Richie didn’t apologize for things. He didn’t feel bad for things. He certainly didn’t try to comfort people. But George could’ve almost swore that was exactly what he was trying to do, in his own way.  
             “Just botch the thing,” Richie said, their voices low. “Can’t be hard, right?”  
              Eddie rubbed at his eyes tiredly. “You know Bill would fucking kill me if I didn’t even try.”  
               “So maybe he’s not there. Maybe he gets…distracted on the way.” Richie had fallen into a bad impersonation of a mafia boss. “Maybe he has an accident.”  
              Eddie’s eyes widened, and he pushed Richie’s shoulder. “Shut the fuck up. Someone’s going to hear you.”  
              Richie raised his voice significantly. “Break his legs? You want me to break Bill’s legs?”   
              “ _Richie._ ”  
              “Bill Denbrough? His legs? Broken and mangled, possibly beyond repair? I mean, geez, Eds, kind of an overkill, but alright.”  
              “Shut up!” But Eddie had started laughing. It was the first real emotion he’d shown all day, and Richie looked proud of himself.  
              In the end, the cheerleaders didn’t laugh Eddie out of the gym. They barely let him leave at all. The girls in charge of sign-ups jumped so whole-heartedly on the idea of adding him to the team, he was practically initiated right there, try outs be damned. When he left the gym, Bill and the rest of them were waiting for him. Eddie had a far-off look in his eye and a deeply set scowl.   
              Mike spoke first. “So, how’d it—”  
              “THEY TOUCHED THE GROSS, FUCKING FLOOR, THEN THEY TOUCHED MY FUCKING FACE. THEY’RE GODDAMN ANIMALS.” Eddie stormed down the hallway before anyone could say more to him, violently rubbing at his face and his arms like they were covered in acid.  
              Stan gave Bill a hollow smile. “Congratulations. You have a purse dog.”  
              By the end of the day, word that one of Bill's had joined the cheerleaders caught through the school like a drought fire. People would approach Beverly and congratulate her for it.   
               The first few times, she'd just snort a laugh. "Wrong skirt, pal." She jerked her thumb at Eddie. He abhorred the wide-eyed stares that the students would then turn towards him. They looked like brain dead owls.  
               "I haven't joined anything! I just put my goddamn name down."  
               But as far as the student body was concerned, he was already in. Even the cheerleaders seemed bent on coddling him through the process, telling him he didn't have to know anything yet, they'd help him. They had a few verbal objectors in their ranks -- namely, a few girls Eddie had personally insulted at one point or another throughout the years, and others who thought the whole thing was shameless and discreditable to their sport -- but their dissents were drowned out by the rest.   
               When the initial surprise had settled over the students, the real trouble started. The town's tolerance for candy-asses was famously low. The modern concept of a male joining a female-dominated art like cheerleading was absolutely progressive, and "progressive" in Derry, Maine was defined as "that New Age hippy shit with all the queers in it."  
               It would happen in a cough as someone walked by, or in an offhanded conversation from someone unwittingly standing within earshot of the rest of the group. Small things – small comments, small knowing looks as Eddie passed. George didn’t doubt it would’ve escalated quickly if left unchecked, but Eddie had something the rest of the school didn’t.   
              Someone had the nerve to paint “dick sukr” on Eddie’s locker; on Bill’s word, Stan had a name and that person’s own locker number by noon. The guy came in the next day to find every last thing in his locker burnt to unrecognizable ash and covered in pig’s blood. That was the most ostentatious they’d ever been about it. They mostly stuck to planting drugs after that.  
              The few people who made derogatory comments as they passed were later approached by Ben, the inconspicuous message delivery boy. Everyone always forgot he was one of Bill’s now and had no reason to doubt him when he pointed them towards a classroom or locker room, saying someone was asking for them. They’d go into the empty room, and Richie or Mike would be waiting for them with whatever blunt object they’d picked up along the way – baseball bat, hockey stick, shovel, the library’s copy of Les Mis. They never actually assaulted anyone, but they made enough of a show to leave them scared. They’d even sent in Beverly for this a few times. She was wielding a lead pipe Richie had found out by the Barrens and struck a terrifying image once she got going.  
              And Bill was above them, moving the pieces and keeping their hands clean. Nothing incriminating was ever found afterwards. Kids could point a finger at them as much as they wanted, yelling until their throat went raw, but there was no proof. Nothing to lead back to them. Bill had long made sure of it.  
              But today, Richie had forgotten this important aspect of their revenge plans – or he didn’t care. Two juniors found Eddie by himself in the cafeteria, drearily doing homework, and for some reason decided they had a death wish. It was the only explanation George could think of for why they’d so brazenly approach him and start spouting about the cafeteria’s “no fag policy.”   
              Eddie looked stunned – not by what they said, but by them having the audacity to say it to his face. “They’ve still got that open-door policy for inbreds though, huh,” he said.   
              The juniors looked at each. “What’d you fucking say, you queer?” the other one said.  
              Eddie ticked his head to the side. He was just annoyed now. “I said, does your mother know you’re fucking her with that mouth?”  
              “You goddamn little—" He grabbed Eddie’s mostly untouched lunch tray and upended the whole thing onto the papers in front of him. To Eddie’s credit, he didn’t yell. He didn’t go stumbling back off his seat. He didn’t really move at all; just stared at the mess in front of him, then slowly looked down to see that quite a bit of it had gotten on his shirt.  
              “You’re dead,” the junior said. “You hear me? I’m sick of you and your ganky friends, slinking around thinking people are scared of you and your stupid power play bullshit. You're fucking nothing, and someone's about to come along and cut that pretentious look off your faces.”  
              It would’ve ended here. The juniors would have walked off, satisfied in their own show of power, and then the rest of the group would be left to plan out their turn.   
              But instead a voice piped up from behind them. “Hey, assholes.”  
              The boys turned around to find Richie standing there.   
               He smiled. “Kids these days, am I right? I blame that music television.” Before they could react, he pulled out a gun from the back of his waistband and fired at them twice.   
  
\-------  
  
              “It wasn’t funny.”  
              Stan hit the blue croquet ball and watched as it pushed Beverly’s out of the way.   
               She hardly noticed. “It was pretty goddamn funny. I mean, did you see them? They actually pissed themselves. There was a trail!”  
               For all the talk back at the school, they'd barely touched any of their school work. They were finding it exceptionally hard to concentrate on anything. Even Stan was spending most of his time tapping his pen against the table and staring absently out a window. Within an hour, they’d shoved it all to the side and wandered into the backyard, as was the way of things.   
               Since Bill still hadn't shown up, George could sit this game out.   
              Mike laughed. “He's lucky they didn't expel his ass right there."  
              “He'll be lucky if they don't arrest him," Ben said.  
              Eddie was leaning on his mallet, his chin resting on the back of his hands. George didn't think he’d actually played a turn in twenty minutes. "Arrest him for what? They were just blanks," Eddie said.  
              “Why was he even carrying a gun full of blanks?" George asked. He was asking the group but Ben was the only one who acknowledged him with a shrug.  
               “Why does Richie do anything?"  
              “You gotta admit, there's a genius to his madness,” Mike said. “Just see if anyone tries to pull shit like that again.”  
              Stan pointed his mallet at Mike. "Don't encourage this. Richie's not a student film project. There's no deeper meaning to what he does. He's a reckless idiot, and he's only getting off because Bill's letting him.”  
               Ben shook his head. “I really don’t think Bill can—”  
               Stan cut him off. “He can, and he will. Even if it’d be better for everyone if he didn’t. Now Richie's just going to start carrying around a loaded pistol to solve every minor inconvenience. And with that shit-eating grin like he’s accomplished something. God, he’s going to be insufferable."  
  
               It was a little over an hour before Bill finally showed up with Richie in tow. All Bill was willing to say on the matter was, “It’s done. Drop it.”  
               Richie was still clearly jazzed about the whole thing, but he showed impressive self-control and kept his mouth shut. He did however allow himself one small act of rebellion when he caught Eddie’s eye and winked at him.   
               A smile quirked at the edge of Eddie’s lips, and he silently mouthed back, “Moron.”  
               An unnerving silence fell over all of them, and it took George a second to realize it was because everyone was waiting for Bill. They were waiting for him to tell them where they went from here. What they were supposed to do.   
               Bill, for his part, looked exhausted and fed up with the whole day. He ran a hand through his hair, then sighed. “How much of the i-inventory sheet for th-the Fall F-F-Festival did you get d-done?”  
               Stan opened his mouth, then shut it and crossed his arms. “I got through most of it this morning.”  
               “Okay? And? Y-you’ve had all d-day to f-f-finish it.”  
               “Forgive me if we were a little preoccupied.”  
               “Preoccupied?” Bill stared at him like he’d suddenly started speaking backwards. “D-did one of you at l-l-least start the s-s-student election wri-write-ups?”  
               Stan’s response was the genuinely abashed way he refused to look Bill in the eye.  
               George couldn’t help himself. “Don’t worry though, they can work as a functioning unit without you.”  
               If it were possible to set someone on fire with your eyes, the look Stan cut George then would’ve done it. Still worth it.   
               Bill had to take a moment to collect himself again. He had to do that often when trying to talk while emotionally charged, or his stutter would get so bad he could barely get a word out. It had the added effect of making those long silences before he spoke a tad menacing.  
               Bill let out a steady breath through his nose. He tried to say something, but the first word stuck in his throat and he stopped. He grimaced, then stepped past them instead and towards the living room. The rest of them were obviously expected to follow, and with a quiet kind of relief, they did. His seething rage was far preferable when it was left implied. They already knew he was going to keep them here all night. 


	4. How edgey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was supposed to be part of the last chapter, but it was already way too long

               George felt every second he was stuck in that living room, watching the hands on the grandfather clock tick by slower. And slower. He’d finished all of his homework by ten, and had nothing to do but sit and watch the rest of them as they worked. He’d offered to help when they started going over ideas for page spreads in the yearbook, but Stan had slammed him with such a contemptuous glare, George immediately backed away.  
               Eventually, George went out onto the back patio and took root at the only table out there. Others would come and go, taking smoke breaks or just getting away for a few minutes, but they largely ignored him. Around eleven, Ben came out of the house by himself. He had something in his hand that George’s brain wouldn’t let him register as a cigarette. Ben didn’t smoke. But George watched him hold up a light to the end of it anyway.  
               Ben wordlessly came over and joined him at the small table. They sat for a while, the only sound coming from the far off noises of the town or the rustling of the trees.  
               “Hey,” George finally said, “today happened, right? I didn’t imagine that? Because you’d think nothing happened.”  
               Ben gave a half-hearted smile. “It’s the loudest thing they’ve done in a while, but definitely not the worst. You get used to it.”  
               “I don’t think I want to.”  
               Ben didn’t respond. He took a drag off the cigarette. There was a strange disconnect in the image of him and the lit cigarette, and it was causing George to stare out of the corner of his eye.   
               “You want to know something weird?” Ben said after a while. He hesitated, like he was second guessing his next words, then he swallowed. “I thought I saw someone in the cafeteria today, when that mess was going down.”  
               George laughed a little. “Vague much? Who?”  
               Ben glanced at him, then he looked back behind them at the house. They could still see the rest of the group in the living room through the sliding glass door. He turned back to George. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? It’s… just don’t. Please. You’re the only one who’d let me live this down.”  
               George scrunched his eyebrows together. “Who did you see?”  
               “Just promise me.”  
               “Alright, man,” George said, holding up his hands placatingly. “I won’t tell a soul.”  
               “Sorry. It’s really not that serious. It just weirded me out.” Ben took another drag. “I don’t even know where to start,” he muttered. “So, I went to the movies a few weeks ago with some people from the library. When we came out, I saw this guy standing on the other side of the street. It was noon and at least in the mid-80s, so I remember thinking it was weird that he was wearing this long leather jacket and a hat. He even had the collar turned up where you couldn’t see his face. It was kind of weird, but that was it. I didn’t really think about him for a while after that. We were standing out front just talking for at least fifteen, twenty minutes, and I swear this guy never moved. There were plenty of people around, but nobody bothered him, and after a while, I noticed no one was even looking at him. He was standing there in this get-up and no one was even sparing the guy a glance. I started getting kind of paranoid that he was watching us.”  
               “Was he?” George asked.  
               “I have no idea. I tried to sort of casually point him out to the people I was with, but…uh.”  
               “What?”  
               Ben let out an incredulous laugh. “They, uh, they said they didn’t see anyone.”  
               George blinked. “I don’t understand. Did he leave?”  
               Ben shook his head. “He was still standing right there. I kept asking, thinking maybe this was all some big joke, but I think I was just freaking them out. They swore there was nobody standing there.  
               “You know the weird part though? I mean, besides. That tenth-grade girl who went missing a few weeks ago, she was there with us, and that was the day she went missing. I didn’t know her. She was the younger sister of one of the girls in my book club who’d just tagged along. I don’t think we even talked once. But I heard she went missing some time later that night.”    
               “That’s…” George didn’t have an ending for that thought. “Wait, so in the cafeteria earlier--”    
               “I was over with Richie and Stan talking to that conservationist group that shows up sometimes. They had set up their table next to the vending machines, and Stan was mad about it for some reason. I don’t remember. It didn’t help that they kept cutting him off to talk about children in Africa. But, anyway, I guess I was zoning out and just watching the room. I caught a glimpse of someone standing by the wall on the other side by the entrance doors, and this sort of shock ran through me because I swear it was that guy again. It was right as all the stuff with Eddie started going down. Richie pushed past me, and by the time I looked over at the other side of the room again, there wasn’t anybody there.”  
               Ben studied the mostly diminished cigarette stub. “I think I’m losing my mind.”  
               George awkwardly rubbed the side of his neck. He couldn’t really disagree. “Why would he be…”  
               “I don’t know, George.” Ben stubbed what was left of the cigarette into a nearby ashtray. “There probably wasn’t even anyone there. Or it was just some kid, and with everything happening, my mind freaked out on itself. It shouldn’t be bothering me this much.”  
               “I mean, I get why it would though,” George said. “It’s fucking creepy.”  
               “Yeah.” Ben turned to him again. “But seriously, please don’t tell any of the others. They’d lay into me so fast about this.”  
               George tilted his head and squinted a little. “Wait. Are you telling me I have blackmail on you now? That’s like currency around here, isn’t it?”  
               Ben gave him a dry smile. “If you want to start your full Bill transformation early, sure.”  
               “Holy shit,” George looked down at his hands. “I…I can feel it. The transference of absolute power. Is this what it means to be like a God? I could make you scale the Standpipe if I wanted to.”  
               “I don’t think I could do that even if _I_ wanted to.”  
               “You have to. Or I’ll tell Bill you saw a guy in a jacket not once, but twice.”  
               Ben rolled his eyes.  
               “Okay, but seriously,” George said, putting his hands down, “I won’t say anything. I promise. I avoid talking to them when I don’t have to, anyway.”  
               “That’s probably for the best.” Ben rubbed a hand over his eyes, then he stood. He moved like he was about to start for the house again, but stopped and turned back to George. “Oh, and, uh, I know it was a while ago, but, what I said about people seeing Bill in you – I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, I know people see the last name and assume, but it’s not true. You’re not Bill.”  
               George knew what Ben was saying. It was a compliment, but he had spent such a dominant part of his life wishing for nothing else but to _be Bill_ he was having trouble knowing how to feel about this. Even now, did he still want to be his brother? He wouldn’t have thought so, but he couldn’t ignore the palpable weight settling in his gut from the statement. He wasn’t Bill.  
               “And if I could make one suggestion,” Ben continued, “don’t ever be.”  
               George let out a breathy laugh. “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”  
               Ben gave him a smile that was trying to be sympathetic but came out tired and disingenuous, then turned and went back into the house. He left George alone in the dark with the town that had suddenly grown quiet and the trees that had stopped moving in the dead wind.           
                                
\------------               
                   
               George had never been so grateful for the sound of his bedroom door clicking shut. The temperature had eventually dropped too low for him to stand hanging around outside and he had trudged his way back into the house. It was one in the morning before Bill looked up at the clock, then at the rest of them and said simply, “We’re done. Get out.”  
               George felt his exhaustion weighing heavy on every one of his bones, and when he went to throw his backpack on his bed, it missed entirely. The backpack’s contents spilled out through the open zipper and onto the floor, spreading papers and books out in a wide arc. George stared blankly at the mess. He was about to just leave everything on the floor to deal with in the morning, but something in the scattered pile caught his eye. He knelt down and opened the back cover of his English textbook where something had peaked out, and he found a mint condition comic underneath, still in its plastic slip. He stared at it first in fascination, then in horror. It was one of the new Tony Greer comics that Dorsey had been showing him. He must’ve picked it up by accident when he was being rushed by Stan. But that was two weeks ago. Had it been in there this whole time?   
               George groaned. Great, now Dorsey probably thought he’d stolen it, something you’d expect from one of Bill’s spoiled lap dogs.               
               He couldn’t remember seeing Dorsey since then, and it was weird that he hadn’t confronted George to get it back. Or maybe he’d been too scared to, what with the ever hanging possibility of crossing one of Bill’s wrong and ending up in an empty room with Richie and a baseball bat. Or, rather, a gun, as the collective student body’s mental image had undoubtedly become.  
               George put the comic back in his backpack, then went ahead and haphazardly ushered the rest of his stuff back inside while he was down there. He’d give it back tomorrow, along with the most heartfelt apology he could muster. Dorsey really had been his friend once and had tried to get a little of that back, and it made George sick to think it came off like he’d taken advantage of him.  
               He was about to zip the bag closed, but his hand froze on the zipper. That was the first issue of Greer’s newest series in there, the one George had lost all hope of ever getting to read before its special 50th anniversary rerelease or something. Regardless of how it had happened, he did have the comic right now. It’d be a waste to ignore this opportunity. He slid the comic back out of his bag, and he was incredibly relieved to find the tape on the back of the plastic had already been pulled off. It would’ve been hard to make his case of innocence if he returned it freshly torn open.  
               Flipping through the pages, he was careful at first, taking extra caution not to bend or crease the pages. It looked different than he’d expected. Greer did most of the illustrations himself, but the art style was significantly darker and grungier than his previous works, which was fitting considering his stories had always been dark. If anything, it was shame he hadn’t made the change years earlier.   
               He read through the small book once, the story flying past much quicker than he wanted, then he read through it again. In the two or three years since he’d stopped reading comics, he’d always been aware on some surface level that Greer was his favorite writer, but now he was finally remembering exactly why. He wrote stories that weren’t tailored for a general audience. If anything, it felt like he was writing them solely for himself. They were weird, sometimes going off on tangents, or throwing in references so layered and obscure, it was like accidentally stumbling into someone’s inner thoughts without any context. It was bizarre and dark and interwoven into a story that had to be reread three or four times before finally making sense. George had tried to explain this to Bill once a few years earlier, but Bill had just rolled his eyes.  
               “Random and i-incohesive. How edgey.”  
               But that was the thing George liked about Greer’s stories. Everything felt random and disjointed until you had all the pieces and went back to the beginning to start putting them all back together. No detail was inconsequential. It opened up layers and layers to every story and every character in ways George hadn’t seen done before, or at least, not to this effect.   
               More than anything, George just clicked with Greer’s characters more than he did with others. The story’s stuck with him, once he put them all together, and there were a few quotes from Greer’s older stuff that George had repeated to himself so often over the years, he almost forgot they weren’t common sayings. In a way, Greer’s stories had helped him build his sense of self. They’d greatly influenced his sense of humor and the way he saw the world.   
               And it wasn’t until now, finishing the last page of the small comic book for a third time, that he remembered that. He closed it with a sigh. Naturally, he could only get a base understanding of what the story was and would have to wait until more issues came out before things would start to make sense. George had a better idea than most of where it could be going from here, knowing Greer’s general MO and already picking up on details that seemed insignificant now but will most likely come up later. He felt an old sense of excitement and anticipation that he didn’t know he was still capable of. He assumed he’d outgrown it. He felt so – himself.   
               It reminded him of something else he hadn’t thought about in a while.  
               He slid the comic back into its plastic slip and into his backpack. It was nearly two-thirty, but his exhaustion from earlier was gone. He stood and walked over to his closet. There was a large box stuffed into the corner, covered in shirts that had fallen off hangers weeks, if not months, ago. He even had his backpack from middle school sitting on top of it, still full of old notebooks and late library books he was probably never taking back. He shoved everything off the box and dragged it out of the closet. The top hadn’t been taped or folded shut like the things in here were something to be preserved. It was too late for that anyway. He opened the flaps and found complete disarray. It was filled with bent and torn comic books, broken action figures, and bits of posters that had been either shredded to pieces or were carelessly stuffed in and smashed under the weight of everything else.   
               George wanted to blame Bill. He wanted to say Bill had been the one to tear down everything that had ever meant something like happiness to George and thrown it all in a ratty cardboard box, but he couldn’t. George had done this to himself. Back when he was still lying awake at night because his crippling sense of insignificance was like a living creature crawling under his skin. Back when he felt so useless, so impossibly _lame_ , and every action figure and poster that encircled his room stood as a burning testament to that. He was such a goddamn child. It was humiliating. One night, in a fit of rage, he’d torn it all down. He’d been crying so hard, he couldn’t see what he was reaching for, but it didn’t matter because it all needed to be broken and stripped away until there was no sign it had ever been there at all. Most of the posters had been shredded beyond recognition and the comic books had either lost all their pages or been torn straight in half. He’d thrown it all into a box and told himself he’d burn it. Like some kind of sacrificial offering to a faceless God, he’d burn the whole box and every last fucking thing in it.   
                  But he never did. It just sat in his closet, collecting dust and renegade shirts. It hurt to see the state he’d left it all in, like casualties of some great war. He closed the box flaps again. On second thought, he actually was tired. 


	5. Initiation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise, this story isn't dead. I just write,,,,slowly,,,,

               George thought the incident had died when Richie and Bill came back that night. He thought Bill had “taken care of it”, whatever the fuck that meant, and they were done with the whole mess. Or, at least, he’d hoped. In the end, while Bill wasn’t happy about what had happened, it had still happened, and the way he saw it, they had two options: either they went back to school and play the ignorance card like goddamn cowards, or they rode the aftershock for all it was worth. Bill knew there was a way to spin this back in their favor. There was always a way.  
               It started simply enough. When people noticed the table at the center of the cafeteria was empty the next day, it piqued a small wave of conversation.  
               _Of course they weren’t here. Tozier pulled a gun on some kids yesterday, you know. What? How did you not hear about that? What hole are you crawling out of? No, they’re not dead, dumbass.  
              _The table remained empty the next day, and the day after. By Thursday, a few brave souls began to perch themselves on it like wary birds on an empty picnic table, talking big like they’d fight for their right to sit there if they had to, but still nervously glancing at the cafeteria doors every so often.  
               Most students refused to believe that Richie hadn’t been expelled. When the slow chime of the morning announcements rang out over the school the next morning, conversations dropped. For the first time in three years, Richie’s jarring voice wasn’t there to forcibly shake people awake. Instead, they were met by the soft, old voice of one of the ladies in the front office. The contrast alone was almost more jarring than Richie himself. She read the announcements simply, wished them a good day, then clicked the intercom off, leaving the school to sit in its new, slightly skewed reality.  
               Richie was still at the school though, as anyone in his classes could attest to, but that only made things weirder since class was the _only_ place anyone ever saw him for longer than a fleeting glance in the hallways, like some sort of cryptid. It was much the same for the rest of Bill’s group. Over the next week, the group did an impressive job of keeping only to where they absolutely needed to be – class right at the bell, keeping group and club involvement to an absolute minimum, never loitering in public, and never deigning small talk. When the last bell of the day rang, they were off campus faster than most students could finish shoving everything in their lockers.   
               It was never lost on George how funny it would’ve been if other students could see them when that last bell rang, rushing their way out to Bill’s car or Mike’s truck. It would have been funny in how incredibly unintimidating they would’ve looked. Beverly and Richie usually made a game of it, scoping out hallways like they were pulling off a diamond heist in a spy movie. Bill cut them off when they started trying to give everyone stupid and incredibly offensive codenames. Once, when they were making this run, most of them had gone ahead of George, disappearing past a turn in the hallway. A second later, all he’d heard from that next hallway was Richie yelling, “DUCK AND ROLL.” It was immediately followed by the sound of Eddie screaming. Bill made them drop the whole schtick after that.   
               It took a few days before George could fully understand what Bill was trying to do, why he was so adamant about making them sneak around like fugitives on the run. It was making the collective overactive imagination of the student body work in overdrive.   
               Bill would have to send someone out to stoke the fire every so often. People saying it was all bullshit. People saying the group really had gotten in trouble and now they were too chickenshit to face anyone. Bill shut them down real quick. More cornering people in empty rooms, empty parking lots – in one extreme case, at their home. Leaving clearly visible threats on lockers, not always in a written form.   
               He made sure they knew nothing had changed – he made sure they knew everything was different now.  
               Rumors started spreading, the most outlandish being that what Richie pulled had just been a test run – that now Bill knew they could get away with it, and maybe they were all planning their move on the school. Few people seemed to respond to this with any seriousness, but the talk still made George nervous. The last thing he needed was to get pulled out of class so the police could give him the business about an alleged conspiracy to commit federal crimes.   Needless to say, that never happened. The talk stayed just talk – and more importantly, it stayed. It evolved.   
               The overarching belief eventually became that Richie’s blanks weren’t a test run for some big shoot out. They were starting shots for a new era in Derry High. They were a point proven. It not only told Bill that he could do shit like this in public and the adults would let him get away with it, it told the student body at large. Where there’d been that faint glimmer of hope that if Bill could just get caught, if any of them would just slip up once and be proven guilty for their reign of terror on the school, they’d be knocked off their golden pedestals, there was now the dawning realization that they really were untouchable. Nearly overnight, they had upgraded from the morally corrupt popular kids with inflated egos to something like the fear of walking home alone down an unlit street at night.  
               George had to admit, watching all this happen from the inside had been incredible. As far as he could tell, Bill barely discussed any of this with the group ahead of time. He didn’t lay out a game plan or give them the ultimate goal. They just did it on the vaguest of prompting, like trained soldiers who’d finally received the codeword they’d been preparing their whole lives for.   
               On the flipside, this had left George absolutely floundering. Bill clearly expected all of them to just _know_ what they were supposed to be doing. George hadn’t gotten that mental memo. Near the beginning of the week, he had made the egregious error of stopping in the hallway to talk to a classmate. It was a boy George had usually seen hanging around with Dorsey, and George hadn’t seen either of the Corcoran brothers since that brief talk on the stairs. He started the conversation under the guise of asking what homework he’d missed from Toran’s class, which he’d outright skipped three days in a row by this point. He’d had the question about Dorsey right on the edge of his tongue when Bill seemed to appear out of nowhere. Without a word, he gripped George by the arm and forcibly pulled him away from the conversation and down the hall. Bill’s expression had remained neutral as they walked, but when he shoved George into a nearby empty bathroom and George had to twirl back to face him, stumbling from the push, the air seemed to suck itself right from the room. Bill looked absolutely livid.  
               “Bill…” George’s voice faltered. He didn’t understand. He’d gotten the basic gist of what was happening. He knew from watching the others that they weren’t supposed to stay out in the open or let conversations go on too long. But the conversation couldn’t have lasted more than two, maybe three minutes. It hadn’t even been about anything significant. He didn’t know that kid and they’d talked to each other like strangers. He could wrap his head around why Bill would be a little upset, but to react like this?  
               Bill took a silent breath, that look passing over him that always meant he needed to calm himself down. He was too worked up. If he tried to talk, it would just be a rapid-fire of stuttered syllables fighting their way out of a losing battle. But he couldn’t shake it. George couldn’t remember the last time his brother had been so angry.   
               _Fuck, what did I do? Please, Bill, just tell me. What did I do? What do you want me to do? Please. PLEASE. TALK TO ME._  
               But much like his brother, the words couldn’t force their way out of his throat. Bill gave him one last hard stare, then he turned and left George there in the bathroom, letting the faint throb of pain on the boy’s arm speak for him.  
               Ben, the only thing even remotely working as a source of understanding in this wonderland of bullshit, only managed to make it worse when George approached him about it later. Ben had looked horrified, but, to George’s immense annoyance, at what George had done, not Bill.  
               “Cripes.” Ben ran a hand through his hair, his eyes a little wide. “You can’t push him like that. God knows what he’s going to do now.”  
               “Push him like _what_?” George asked. “What did I do?”  
               Ben did the worst thing he could’ve done. He looked at George the way someone would look at a dying bug, it’s leg still twitching uselessly. Like he was something you feel bad for but that you know is doomed beyond help. He looked at him with empty pity. “You’re not acting like the person he needs to take over after we’re gone. You’re sort of just acting like… a person.”  
  
               It took a week of this before George felt he was finally understanding what was going on, but that hardly made him feel much better. It just made him feel like an idiot for not getting it sooner and annoyed for even having to figure it out by himself. Like they were some great puzzle that needed to be solved. _Gag_.  
               He was sitting in his first class on a Monday morning, the din of weekend fueled conversation passing over and around him, staring unfocusedly at the pages of his notebook and the shitty doodles he’d scribbled in the margins. Even in the familiar casualty of the voices around him, George was fully aware of the way the other students kept their distance from his desk. It was a bit of a relief, actually. Less effort on his part to not fuck up.  
               The morning chime rang out over the intercom, the same smooth chime as every morning, barely audible over the noise of the classroom. Then a voice cut in, and it was like a bomb had dropped in the middle of the room.  
               “ _Gooooooooood morning, Derry High,_ and all you swells fortunate enough to be breathing in that sweet smell of cows, diesel, and weed this town calls air.”   
               A barely audible “ _Richard_ ” could be heard form one of the office ladies off behind him.  
               “Oops. Mrs. G’s giving me those “don’t say ‘weed’ over the intercom” eyes again. That’s fine. I can dig. We’ll keep it classy and call it a fat chonger in all announcements from now on. Deborah, write that down.”  
               More barely audible reprimands, but as usual, Richie was allowed to prattle on, with about half of what he was saying sounding like actual announcements next to a shitty improv routine.   
               George stared blankly up at the mounted intercom. Richie was back. No one had told him anything about this. George knew Richie had only been temporarily suspended from the position and from his place in the theater department, but actually putting him back in it, bringing him loudly into the forefront for all the school to bear witness, wasn’t something Bill would allow without purpose. Something was changing again, and again, George was just going to have to stumble around until he figured out what it was. He was weirdly relieved to find he was too tired to be pissed off this time.   
               A girl murmured from off to George’s left. “For real? I thought we were done with this jerkoff.”  
               George turned and caught her eyes, rather unintentionally, and the eyes of the girl she was murmuring to. They both startled, and he was suddenly more annoyed by this than by Richie’s unexplained return. Why was the school like this? Why were they allowing themselves to be so run over like helpless, wild animals? He wasn't some unknowable terror rising up from the depths.   
               It struck him then. Looking at these girls and their expectant looks of bad things to come – from _George_ of all people – he was reminded of something he’d overheard Bill say last summer.   
               “ _Ho-horror movies are only ef-f-feh-effective when they play with y-your fear of the unknown. The sc-scariest monster is th-the one you can’t see.”_  
               An unknowable terror. It didn’t matter what Richie’s return signified. George had no idea. He might know later, but it didn’t fucking matter. His only role was to play it like he did.  
               The timer had started; these girls were looking at him. He let whatever instincts he’d cultivated over the last few months take control. He would’ve thought Bill would be the source he’d naturally grab from. Bill and that empty, unreadable stare. It was an expression George knew more intimately than his own face. But when his expression shifted, when his eyelids fell, and he felt the slight pull of a grimace, looking at these girls like they were the most tedious things on the planet, it was Stan that came into his mind.  
               He flicked a cold glance at them the way he’d seen Stan do a thousand times before, barely long enough to acknowledge them as dirt, then turned away. He hoped they couldn’t see the way he was clenching his hands to keep them from shaking.   
                 
                The bell rang, signaling the end of class, drowning out the teacher’s last second reminders about due dates. George was out of his seat and halfway to the door before the shrill of the bell had faded out. He barely made it three feet from the door before someone stepped out in front of him, blocking his path. George noticed the male cheerleading outfit first.  
               With his arms crossed and perpetual discontent set on his face, Eddie looked for all the world like a mother who’d been waiting for her son to come home so she could scold him about the unsavory things she’d found in his room.  
               “We’re meeting by the west entrance at noon,” Eddie said. “Right at the bell. You got it?”  
               There was an unsolicited aggression in his voice that George was absolutely not in the mood for. “Uh, yeah. Noon. Got it.”  
               Eddie didn’t look convinced. “Seriously, we’re not going to wait around for you to take your sweet ass time.”  
               “I said I got it,” George snapped. Eddie blinked in surprise, and George cleared his throat awkwardly, toning his voice back down. “I’ll be there.”  
               “Whatever.” Eddie sighed. “It doesn’t affect me either way.” He moved like he was about to leave, but George stopped him.  
               “Hey. So, the announcements this morning. With Richie.” He hesitated, not knowing exactly what he was trying to ask. “What are we—”  
               “Jesus,” Eddie groaned. “You ask too many fucking questions. Just think for two seconds, will you?”  
               George’s temper flared again. “I keep trying, but every time I get anywhere close to catching on, you all change it up on me again. I’m starting to think you’re doing it on purpose.”  
               Eddie gave him the mirror expression of what George had tried to pull off in the classroom. _Tedious_. “Think. Richie was suspended from his duties for a week, most of which he does every day and in front of a lot of people. He suddenly pulls a fucking disappearing act and then everyone knows he got in trouble. The school would have something over him. He comes back on the announcements a week later acting like nothing happened, like he can just take back the spotlight and hope everyone pretends the last week didn’t happen, how does that make him look? Or any of us, for that matter.”  
               _Like goddamn cowards.  
              _George was reeling a little. “But if we all do it…”  
               “If we all do it _right_ , you change the story completely,” Eddie said. “See? You know your brother. Just think for two seconds. It does wonders.”  
               He was right. This entire line of logic was the most _Bill_ thing George had ever heard. And the fact that it had actually worked…  
               “Noon,” Eddie said one last time, then he turned on his heels before George could respond and walked off down the hallway, quickly disappearing among the rest of the students.  
                 
               Despite whatever Eddie had been expecting, George had no trouble making it to the west entrance of the school by noon. He’d made the effort to stay for the fifteen minutes or so of his biology class, then peaced out. There hadn’t even been a half-assed excuse this time. He hadn’t said anything at all, just slipped out of the room, all eyes watching him as he went, save for the teacher, who was very distinctly looking anywhere else.  
               He was a little surprised to only find Eddie, Richie, and Stan waiting for him when he got there. He must have been earlier than he thought.  
               “Oh, good. Our little heir apparent,” Stan said as George approached. Stan jerked his head towards the general direction behind them. “Let’s go.”  
               “We’re not going to wait for the others?” George asked.  
               “The other what? Are you expecting a guest?”  
               “It’s just us, muchacho,” Richie said. He was leaning on Eddie, like the other boy was more conveniently placed countertop than person. Eddie looked annoyed, but he didn’t make any move to push him off. If anything, he looked like he’d fought that battle already. He was a defeated man who was begrudgingly accepting his fate. “The others didn’t make it,” Richie continued. He patted Eddie’s shoulder almost comfortingly. “We’ll have to repopulate the clan ourselves.”  
               “Eugh!” Eddie tried to shove him off. “Get off me! Go repopulate your own fucking self.”  
               Richie stayed adamantly attached. “Well, damn, Heart attack, what do you think I’m already doing with my nights? I guess I could do it a little harder, but you’re going to have to get me some new material to work with. You can barely make out the masturbation shots of your mom I’ve been using.”  
               Eddie gave Richie another solid shove, finally pushing him off, but clearly at Richie’s concede. Eddie let out a gagging noise, flicking his arms once like he could flick the residual Richie germs off them, then stormed away from the group. Stan rolled his eyes and followed after.   
               Richie yelled after them: “You’re going to have to call me daddy eventually, Eddie. Just accept it now. It’ll be easier.”  
               “Go bag that fucking trash you call a face,” Eddie yelled back over his shoulder.  
               Richie snickered, then jogged ahead to catch up with them.  
               George frowned, watching them as they went. Not for the first time, he was struck by how much he didn’t want to be here right now. With a sigh, he too followed after, but with no considerable effort to catch up.   
               It only took a few steps before he realized where they were heading, and his stomach started to sink. The cafeteria. Why were they heading towards the cafeteria? He knew Eddie said he asked too many questions, but, fuck, what was the plan? What was he walking into? Was Bill going to be there already, waiting for them? Watching them as they walked in, scrutinizing their every move in front of the student body. For that matter, where _was_ Bill? God, George was going to be sick.  
               He nearly asked them, even opened his mouth like he might, but knew better than that. Especially not now, this close to the cafeteria and with so many other students filling the hallway. He’d just ride it out. It was what they’d tell him to do.  
               Students around them were watching as they passed, eyebrows raised in surprise and whispering hurriedly.  
               _“They’re coming back?”  
               “Oh, gag me. What now?”  
               “Swear to God, if they pull a Manson on us.”  
               “Shhhhh!”  
              _George felt himself shrinking. He didn’t know what magical force he’d called upon that morning that had granted him the ability to at least look like the attention from these people didn’t terrify him.  
               _Look at him. What a loser.  
               Why is he there?  
               How cute. He still thinks he’s one of the popular kids._    
               He glanced to the other three to see if they were hearing the whispers, if there was any hint of the weight of the stares boring down on them, but somewhere between the west entrance and here, their countenance had seamlessly shifted. Like a blink, they’d slid into the molds they’d sculpted for themselves. They were casual, but not their usual kind of casual. It made George think of how makeup applied for stage productions had to be exaggerated. It had to be noticeable enough so that even those sitting all the way in the back could see it, but not so exaggerated that it looked distractingly unnatural.  
               George hadn’t sculpted his own mold yet. He wasn’t sure how to start. He straightened his shoulders a bit and tried to keep his face blank. It only worked to make his movements feels stilted and unnatural.   
               “Nice of you to join us,” Stan said.  
               For a strange second, George thought Stan was talking to him. His head jerked up to look at him, but Stan’s attention was on someone else. Ben. George had been so focused on his own posture, he hadn’t even noticed the other boy join them. Ben’s chest was heaving slightly like he’d been running.   
               Eddie’s face curled into that same faint disgust he always carried when looking at Ben. “At the bell means at the bell, Carbo-load.”  
               “Sorry, I know,” Ben said between breaths. “I ran into Mrs. Douglas. This was the first time I’ve really gotten to talk to her in forever, so, you know, she wanted to catch up, and I guess…” His voice trailed off as he noticed the apathetic stares he was getting from the others. “Right.”  
               Stan pushed past him. “Now that we’ve wasted that time that we definitely had.”  
               George tried to catch Ben’s eye, to give him some kind of commiseration, but Ben never spared him a look. Just obediently followed after the others to the cafeteria doors.  
               It was almost ominous the way the swinging double-doors still sat closed, save for a few people already going in or out. A teacher would come along within a few minutes to prop them open as they usually were, but for now, it acted as George’s last source of cover for whatever he was walking into.  
               Stan looked to Richie and gestured him towards the door. Richie had clearly been preparing for this moment. With every bit of the dramatics anyone would have expected, Richie shoved both of the doors forward, swinging them out in their full arcs. The door on the right bounced back a little, followed by a loud: “Ah! What the fuck?” The students who hadn’t been in the doors’ path of destruction but close enough were staring at them now in wide-eyed shock.  
               George could have guessed their return to the cafeteria wouldn’t be a smooth, quiet one, but some stupid part of him had dared to hope. But of course it wasn’t enough to just walk in. They had to make an entrance, Richie in the forefront. They’d sapped all the attention in the room, eyes from every table and from the people still standing in the walkways turned to them. The majority of the kids hanging around the center table jumped from it like it was scalding hot and quickly made their distance. The others were apparently keeping true on their big talk and sat back deeper in their seats, their eyes trained warily on the group.  
               Richie led the approach to the table, other students backing up out of their way as they passed. Richie had barely reached the table before loudly slamming a hand down on top of it, making the lunch trays rattle.  
               “Hey!” he said, his voice light and jovial. “I’m sure it’s been just the most getting to sit at the big kids’ table, but the adults are here now. So get lost.”  
               “Or what?” one of the guys asked. He had his arms crossed and was leaning back like he had no plans of getting up from that seat any time soon. His face was only vaguely familiar to George, and he tried to flip through his mental rolodex of upperclassmen to put the face with a name. “You’ll make loud noises at us to death while waving an empty gun around? You’re a joke, Tozier. Go find your own table.”  
               Richie ran his tongue over the inside of his teeth, then let out a humorless laugh. “Cal Clark Kent. The man with the balls of steel. Last time I checked, this _was_ my table, hombre.”  
               Cal…Calvin Clark. That was his name. Looking a few seats over down the table, George saw Calvin’s sister, Cissy, watching them, whispering with the girl beside her.  
               Calvin shrugged. “Guess you should’ve watched it better. We’re not scared of you. It’s all bullshit gab and we’re calling your bluff.”  
               “Man.” Richie leaned forward onto the table. “That’s a tough break, but if you really want to learn the hard way, that’s on you and the current arrangement of your face.”  
               Calvin held Richie’s stare. “Go blow your cheerleader.”  
               An almost manic smile of surprise flicked across Richie’s face. “How about I blow your fucking head off in your sleep?”  
               Calvin stood up suddenly, shoving his chair back with a loud screech. “Are you threatening me?”  
               “Why? You got something to be scared of? You said it yourself, I’m all loud noise.”  
               Stan huffed out an annoyed sigh and moved like he was about to intervene, but Ben’s voice beat him to it.  
               “Clark,” he said. “Are you related to Stuart Clark?”  
               Calvin turned to Ben. “What? He’s my dad. What the fuck is that to you right now?”  
               Ben nodded a little, like he’d just confirmed something. “I remember now. Your dad was one of the head organizers of that huge charity drive in Bassey Park last March for kids in…what was it? Uruguay? The details were kind of vague. But even in a place like Derry, it still ended up raising some thousands of dollars. They mentioned it in Augusta newspapers and everything. That was a pretty big deal.”  
               Calvin’s eyes briefly flicked to his sister like she would share in his confusion, then he looked back at Ben. “And?”  
               “And it would suck if people found out where all that money went.”  
               Calvin’s face fell.  
               Both Eddie and Stan stared at Ben, briefly mirroring Calvin’s surprise, but Stan caught up quickly, adapting to the turn in conversation.  
               “It’s convenient that this town is stupid and forgets things like this so quickly,” Stan said. “It’s not like anyone would follow up or make sure all that money ended up where it was supposed to. And I doubt many people wrote ‘Stuart Clark’s pocket’ on their donation cards.”  
               “It wouldn’t take a lot to remind them,” Eddie added. “Drop an anonymous tip-off in the mail slot at the weekly herald, and that shit would be front page news by tomorrow.”  
               Calvin was staring at them in genuine disbelief mixed with a familiar dawning horror that usually came over people who crossed them like this. “You’re seriously blackmailing my family? It’s a fucking table.”  
               Richie leaned in close to Calvin again and stage whispered: “Then you should probably leave. This table is tearing your shitty family apart.”  
               Everyone at the table was staring at Calvin, watching for his next move. Cissy looked horrified. The girl beside her kept trying to get her attention, but Cissy ignored her.  
               “Cal,” she said through her teeth.   
               Calvin’s jaw tightened. “They’re goddamn insane.” He grabbed his backpack and hefted it over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”  
               “We can’t just—” Cissy started.  
               “They’re not worth it,” he hissed. “I said let’s go.”  
               He stalked off from the table, and slowly, the others trickled after him. Cissy leveled a long glare at Ben as she passed, and to his credit, Ben accepted it, solemnly holding her stare.   
               Stan didn’t wait for the table to clear before he was throwing his bag and books on top of it. “That was obnoxious,” he sighed, taking his usual seat.  
               “I knew there was a reason we kept you around,” Richie said, taking his own seat and Eddie taking the chair beside him.  
               “That was some heavy shit,” Eddie said. “Have you been sitting on that this whole time? Were you, like, waiting for a reason to blackmail him?”  
               Ben shook his head. He put his own bag on the table before sitting down across from them. “I forgot about it actually. Anyone who worked on those charity drives knows the only way that money was going anywhere near Uruguay was if the organizer heads took a vacation there. It’s actually pretty tame compared to the other shady stuff we’ve had go down at bigger events, so I guess it slipped my mind. But, I mean, it’s not exactly a well-kept secret. Someone’s bound to let the ball drop eventually, and I don’t know what you’ll have to hold over Calvin’s head then.”  
               “How about you let me worry about Superman,” Richie said. “I’ll give him a whole new reason to keep his place.”  
               George frowned. “You’re not actually going to show up in his room with a gun, are you?”  
               “Again, let me worry about that.”  
               “Mm. No,” Stan said. “No. _No_. I’m stopping you right there. If you so much as think about pulling that, you will find me already there, waiting, and I will kill you myself.”  
               Richie looked absolutely affronted. “What? Why? I’m not actually going to blow his head off. Just spook him some.”  
               “These last two weeks have done nothing but encourage your stupid spontaneity, and I’m cutting it off right now. You got lucky once.” Stan held up a finger in emphasis. “Bill was willing to make your impulsiveness work in our favor _this once_. Don’t think he’ll be so forgiving a second time.”  
                “Geez. Keep your goddamn Jew hat on. Maybe I was joking, alright?”  
               “Your existence is a joke. That means nothing.”  
               The sound of girlish laughter broke out from somewhere across the room, briefly overtaking the rest of the cafeteria’s noise before slowly settling again. George found the source few tables over, Beverly sitting in the middle of it. She looked like she was chatting amiably with Sally Mueller and a group of some other rich, popular girls. Every so often, they’d break out into lilting laughter again.  
                George wasn’t surprised to see that Ben had found her, too. His eyes were a little sad, the way he always looked when throwing furtive glances at her, holding it a few seconds too long for it to ever come off as casual. George had a hard time understanding the infatuation. Beverly was pretty, sure, and Ben certainly wasn’t the only person in the school throwing her desperate looks whenever she walked by. But a lot of the girls at their school were pretty, and a lot of those same girls would have sooner left people like Ben to rot in a ditch back before he became popular than to have bothered giving him their attention.   
               Beverly was one of these pretty girls. When the rest of Bill’s group were still earning a name for themselves through Derry middle school and spending whatever free time they had to making Ben’s life shit, Beverly hadn’t even bothered. He wasn’t worth the attention. Now she crooned over him in the most painfully patronizing way, coaxing him to do whatever she wanted. That was another one of Beverly’s biggest assets – she was clever. If she wasn’t, Bill never would have kept her around. She was entirely aware how Ben felt and the kind of sway she held over his heart. It was almost more than Bill held over Ben’s self-worth.  
               The fact that Ben still watched Beverly like she held all the secrets to true happiness, like there was something more under her pretty surface than what she gave the world, like it wasn’t all some carefully carved veneer specifically designed to keep people like him in the palm of her hand, was nothing short of fascinating.   
               Ben finally looked away; something else caught his attention. The sound in the room suddenly dimmed, and George saw other heads turn in the same direction, then more as others began to notice. Stan, Richie, and Eddie dropped their conversation and followed everyone’s eyes to the front entrance of the cafeteria. George knew what he’d see before he even turned his head. The double doors had been propped open now, most likely spurred on by Richie’s entrance. Bill and Mike were walking in, as casual and unaffected as anyone else would be walking in. Bill’s public presence was different from the others’, even Mike’s now. Bill’s public presence was just his state of being. He had no separate mold he shifted in and out of depending on who was watching. He walked into that cafeteria with the same cadence he walked into their living room, even if there was no one there but George. It was just who he was, and it demanded the attention of every person in that room without the slightest bit of effort. Whether in spite, mild interest, or fearful reverence, eyes followed them, but neither Bill nor Mike seemed to notice. They walked close, deep in their own conversation, never acknowledging the wider room around them until they got closer to the popular kids’ table.  
               To George’s horror, their attention fell directly on him and their words briefly stopped. Mike gave him an unsettling smile, and George felt something drop in his gut.  
               Mike had been back for weeks now, and something about that hadn’t stopped bothering George for about as long – Mike was all but ignoring him entirely. George wasn’t vying for  his attention or anything, but it was like waiting for the ghost to pop out at you in a haunted house attraction. It had to happen eventually. It came with the territory. But the anticipation of the inevitable scare had been dragged on for so long, George had started jumping at shadows. He had just wanted it over and done with. He was taking that wish back now.  
               Bill whispered one last thing in Mike’s ear as they got closer. Mike just nodded like it was something he knew already, and George could vaguely hear him mutter, “I got it. I got it.” He took the empty seat across from George, that same unnerving smile still ghosting his face. “Well,” he said. “If it isn’t my favorite freshman.”  
               George watched him like a cornered animal just waiting for an excuse to run. “What do you want?”  
               Mike held up his hands. “Hey, calm down. What makes you think I want something? I just got here.”  
               “Because you don’t talk to me,” George replied flatly.  
               Mike shrugged. “So I’m making up for lost time. You’re in this family now; it’s time to make you feel like a part of it, right?”  
               “This family…?”  
               _Swear to God, if they pull a Manson on us.  
_                George glanced at Bill, whose expression remained blank as he watched them. He turned back to Mike. “So, what does that mean? What do you want?”  
               Mike sat back in his chair. “I need you to do something. Call it a favor.”  
               “You need me?”  
               “No, the other kid I’m talking to.”  
               A flare of annoyance sparked through George, but it was interrupted when a thick notebook dropped smack in the middle of the table, hitting against it with a resounding _BANG_. George nearly jumped out of his skin.  
               Beverly’s voice sang out from just behind him. “Voila. Signed and delivered. You got it until the bell rings.”  
               She slid into the empty seat beside him as George stared at the notebook like it might grow teeth and attack. “What—”  
               “I need you to write a note for me,” Mike said.  
               George pulled his wide-eyed stare from the notebook to Mike. “Why would you need me for that?”  
               Mike leaned forward again and opened the notebook to a random page. He tapped the words scribbled there. It was covered in what looked like someone’s world history notes, the first line starting in the middle of a sentence about the Battle of France. “I know you can forge handwriting.”  
               George tried to cover his surprise with a scoff. “What are you talking about?”  
               Mike gave him a bored stare. “We really don’t have time for you to bullshit me right now.”  
               “But…” George’s resolve began to fizzle. No one knew about his knack with forgery. No one. The fact that he’d gone this long without getting caught was its own testament to that. His parents hadn’t signed a report card of his in years. “How could you…” He again looked from Mike to Bill. The corner of Bill’s mouth quirked up, and that heavy feeling dropped in George’s stomach again. He had no secrets in their house.  
               “We heard there’s a kid going around thinking he can pull some shit on one of us,” Mike continued. “And we heard you’re the one he’s been pulling it on.”  
               “Am I?”  
               “The band kid. With the lisp and the shitty haircut.”  
               Richie let out a laugh. “Wait, what’s-his-face – Bradley?”  
               “Yeah. Him.”  
               This just kept getting worse.  
                Bradley was a problem, but he was a small problem. More importantly, he was George’s small problem that he’d really brought on himself. And that he was going to get rid of by himself.  
               He still believed their first run-in had been a genuine accident. Back during the first week of school, Bradley had side-swiped George as they passed in the hall, hard enough for George to drop everything he’d been holding. Bradley recognized him immediately and immediately squared up like he was expecting a fight. George made a big mistake then. He shrank back. He made it clear he wasn’t going to put up a fight, any kind of fight. His next big mistake was never telling Bill or anyone else. He just hadn’t seen a reason to.  
               When Bradley saw no repercussions or even the vaguest sign of a threat from the rest of Bill’s group, he started to think himself a little invincible. He never went too big on the things he did, never drew too much attention to himself, but he drew enough to satiate his own ego. The second time Bradley bumped into George, he made it clear it wasn’t an accident. He knocked the books out of George’s hand like the bully in a cartoon. George just stared at the books now on the floor in genuine shock. He didn’t know what had just happened.   
               A few days later, he showed up at George’s locker between classes. Naturally, George was alone. Bradley never said a word, just came up beside the younger boy and looked him in the eyes as he reached into the locker and started snapping every pencil and pen within reach in half. Again, George watched this in confused shock. He almost said something. He could feel words working their way out of his mouth, but what could he say? _I’ll tell my brother on you_? He wasn’t about to tell Bill anything about this. The whole situation was so stupid and so _nothing_. George should’ve been able to handle this himself. None of the others would’ve stood to be treated like this. He could imagine approaching any one of them, Bill especially, telling them he was being _bullied_ , and the empty blink he’d get in return.  
               _Yeah? You need an adult to hold your hand and take care of that for you? Jesus.  
              _So, as long as it stayed so nothing and quiet and never found out, George would let the mild abuse continue on, telling himself he’d stop it on his own _next time_. It was his problem. He’d take care of it.    
                “Who the fuck is Bradley?” Eddie said.  
                “That kid from my speech therapy,” Bill said.  
               George blinked. “From what?”  
                “You remember,” Richie cut in, more towards Eddie than George, “we were like twelve and he thought he could nuzzle himself in cozy with us like he wasn’t the most annoying thing on the planet.”  
               “No, Richie, we’re talking about Bradley,” Mike cut in. “Not you.”  
               “You’re a real fucking comedian, you know that?”  
                Eddie squinted a little, like he was flashing back to some distant memory and he didn’t like what he was looking at. “Oh, yeah. I remember that kid now.”  
               “I don’t,” Beverly said.  
                Richie put a hand out. “Before your time.” He turned to Mike. “And sure as shit before yours.”  
               “Look, it doesn’t matter,” George said. “It’s nothing. He’s not a problem.”  
               Beverly snickered. “That’s not what we’ve been hearing.”  
               George felt a burn slowly creeping up his neck. “Yeah, well, people exaggerate.”  
               “Sure,” Mike said. “Listen, what’s-his-face has been making eyes at Sally Mueller for a while now.” He tapped on the notebook again. “We’re about to give him a major confidence boost, and he’s going to buy it because he’s too stupid to realize she wouldn’t be caught dead within ten feet of him.”  
               George looked back down at the notebook, his mouth pressed into a thin line. Yeah, Bradley and his cartoonishly petty bullying was annoying, but the idea of calling in reinforcements seemed so ridiculous. It seemed almost beneath Bill and the rest of them to even bother.  
               “Mike,” Bill prompted. He was watching the front entrance through the corner of his eye now.  
               “He alone?”  
               Bill shook his head.  
               “We can work with that.” Mike turned his attention back to George. He was talking a little faster now. “This kid thinks he’s untouchable just because he’s too low radar for us to even look at him twice. Consider this his lesson. He won’t bother you again.”  
               George let out a heavy breath through his nose. It’s not like it was a secret anymore. If they really wanted to help, who was he to tell them no? They’d just be watching him closer than ever as it was all put back in his hands again.  
               Besides, maybe Mike was right. Maybe it was time to lower this kid’s ego a peg.  
               George picked up his pencil and pulled the notebook closer. “What am I writing?”  
               Mike grinned. “That’s what I like to hear. _Ben_!”  
               Ben’s head jerked up in surprise. He’d been reading, completely ignoring the conversation. “What?”  
               “You’re good at the flowery shit. Tell him what he’s writing.”  
               It only took a minute or two to write out. By the end, it was sappy with poetics and worded more like a harlequin romance novel excerpt than words an actual person would say. It was all about secretly harbored love and Sally feeling too shy to approach Bradley in person. It would’ve taken less time to write if George hadn’t stopped in the middle of every sentence to make an almost pained face.   
               “Just write it!” Beverly insisted repeatedly. “Trust me, this isn’t weird. She actually talks like this.”  
               _I don’t want to embarrass myself more than I already have just in giving this note to you. If you don’t share in my feelings, if this isn’t meant to be, throw it away and pretend like it never existed at all. But if you feel this too, this connection that I know in my heart is blooming between us, bring it back to me. If I see this note again before the end of lunch, I’ll know.  
              _“He’s not falling for this,” George said. “No sane person would fall for this.”  
               “He’s almost through the line,” Eddie said. He’d at some point become weirdly invested in this whole undertaking. If George had to guess, he’d say it was around the same time Eddie noticed their target du jour was leaning on the overweight side. Eddie’s animosity towards fat people frequently bordered on unhealthy fixation.   
               Mike grabbed the note and folded it into halves. “It’s good enough. We need a distraction.”  
               Bill looked at Stan. Stan, who’d nearly stayed out of this whole mess through to the end, groaned in annoyance. He gave a quick glance to establish where Bradley and his two friends were, then flicked his eyes over the rest of the room until his attention caught on something.  
               “Thirty seconds,” he said. He stood and headed towards the conservationist group who had once again set up their table by the vending machine, but a barely noticeable few inches farther away like it would make a difference. George and the rest of the table watched the interaction and the way the boy Stan was talking to went from wary to excited in the span of a few seconds. Stan pointed towards where Bradley was standing at the front of the room.  
               Mike slid the note across the table. “Eddie, go.”  
               Eddie grabbed the note and stood so quickly, Richie let out a surprised laugh. He made his way towards Bradley, drawing as little attention as he could. Naturally, a few heads still turned as he went, they didn’t go anywhere without an audience, but as long as it wasn’t Bradley, he didn’t care. He stopped behind one of the cafeteria’s concrete support posts – the one covered in crude marker drawings that the faculty tried to cover with fliers for tutoring or band tryouts – and waited. He peaked around the side and watched as the conservationist kid approached Bradley and his friends from the opposite side of the room, nearly out of breath he was so excited about his educational pamphlets. He drew their attention, immediately launching into a speech he’d probably thrown at a hundred unsuspecting kids before, opening pages in the pamphlet and emphatically pointing to different bulleted points. Eddie waited a beat until their backs were fully to him, then he darted out from the safety of cover. Without a second of hesitation, Eddie slipped the note into Bradley’s lunch tray. No one in the group made a move like they’d noticed a thing, and Eddie was homefree, trotting back to the table at the center of the room.  
               Richie raised his hand for a high-five as Eddie came back to them. “And it’s a hitter, ladies and gentlemen.” Eddie laughed, meeting Richie’s hand. He looked exhilarated.   
               Mike sat back in his seat. “And now we wait for him to ruin his own fool self.”  
               This wasn’t going to work. It couldn’t. No one would be dense enough to fall for something like this. But George couldn’t stop watching with the rest of them as Bradley and his friends finally made their escape, not even attempting to be subtle as they crumpled up the pamphlets they’d been handed and threw them away, and wound their way over to their own table. It was a small kind of torture waiting for him to notice the small square of paper, but his eyes inevitably landed right where they needed to. He unfolded the note slowly, warily, his friends trying to get him to let them look at it too, but he pushed them off and started reading it himself.  
               There was no way he’d believe it was real. He was going to scoff and throw it away with the pamphlet. This wasn’t going to work.  
               Bradley’s eyes widened.  
               “Holy shit.” George hadn’t meant to say that outloud.  
               Bradley’s friends were still egging him on, trying to get him to hand over the note, but he again shook them off. He looked a little lost for words. His eyes found where Sally Mueller was laughing with her friends across the room.  
               “Holy shit,” George said, louder this time. Richie and Beverly kept making small snorts of laughter.  
               Bradley gave the note one last look, swallowed, trying to dredge up some inner well of courage, and stood. George knew he was openly staring now – they all were – but he couldn’t look away from this slowly oncoming trainwreck.  
               Bradley trudged his way to Sally on shaky legs. He stood there by the table, fidgeting awkwardly with the note held in front of his chest like it could protect him. He standing there for an uncomfortably long stretch of seconds before anyone started to notice him. Sally was one of the last to look up, and even from where George sat, he could see the slight frown that pulled at the edges of her mouth at the sight of him. He read the “Yeah?” on her lips. Bradley’s jaw worked like he had something to say, but he settled for jutting his arm out, bringing the note much too close to Sally’s face. She startled and shoved his proffered hand away.   
               Another round of laughter rose around George’s table. Richie and Bev kept making comments to each other too low for George to hear, and Eddie was biting down on his thumbnail like it was the only thing keeping him together. Stan watched the scene with detached interest; Bill, like he was proctoring an exam. Mike’s amused smirk had grown. Ben was trying not to cringe, but like George, couldn’t look away.  
               Bradley said something, and even over the noise of the room, George heard sally say: “My _what_?” She snatched the note out of Bradley’s shaking hand, and, unlike him, let her friends nosily read over her shoulder as she skimmed through it. At first, they just looked confused, then, slowly, their faces lit up and they turned to each other with a chorus of “ _What the fuck?_ ” They busted out into unconstrained laughter. One of the girls took the note before Bradley could grab for it again and passed it down to the interested kids at the other end of the table.  
               “No!” Sally said through her laughter. “Oh God, not a fucking chance, dweebus. Someone just played you bad.”  
               Bradley looked mortified. Richie, Beverly, and Eddie were finally set free to let out their own raucous laughter. Even George had to put a hand over his mouth to keep his own surprised laugh stifled. He couldn’t believe that had worked so easily. How had he let this kid get away with messing with him for this long?  
               The sound of their table brought Bradley’s wide, horrified stare in their direction. He made eye contact with George first, and George didn’t know how else to react. He waved, his badly constrained smile clearly visible behind his hand. He thought he’d feel bad, or at least worst than his. But it just felt like release. This was better than anything he could’ve done on his own.  
               Bradley’s already reddened face flushed with anger. He turned and stormed from the cafeteria through one of the back doors, avoiding passing the popular kids’ table to reach the front entrance. He slammed the door behind him, which a teacher yelled after him for.  
               Beverly wiped at her eye, carefully avoiding her mascara. “Jesus. What a fucking shlub.”  
               George finally turned away from the rest of the cafeteria and back to his table. Mike and Bill were already looking at him. “Bill didn’t think you’d actually do it,” Mike said. “He thought you’d just puss out and call it too mean for your delicate little self.”  
               George felt that burn creeping up his neck again. He hoped Mike was paraphrasing. “I mean, it’s not like he didn’t have it coming.” He saw Sally’s notebook of history was still sitting open in front of him. Some of the letters had somehow gotten a little smudged in the last few minutes. “What about this, though? Did you even need it? I really doubt he would’ve noticed either way.”  
               Beverly snorted. “Clearly. You could’ve had a five-year-old write it in crayon and he wouldn’t notice.”  
               “Then why did you need me?”   
               “To see if you’d even do it, you simpleton,” Stan said. “We didn’t know if you could even manage the bottom of barrel.”  
               Mike set that grin on his face again. “Consider this the first step into your official initiation, kid. Welcome to the family.”   
  
\-----------------------  
  
  
               “Corn chips. And I swear to God, if you get the generic stuff—”  
               “I get it, Richie. I get it.”  
               George closed the door of his brother’s car much harder than he needed to and headed into the small gas station. He knew full well he was being played. Six teenagers who rarely had to pay for anything themselves, and George was the only one to have any cash between them? Yeah, okay. He wasn’t about to hold his breath on them paying him back either, regardless of whatever they told him. So if he was going to buy the generic stuff, it was his goddamn money and Richie could suck it.  
               George felt overdressed walking into the dimly lit store. He was being dragged along to some party all the way in Bangor that Beverly had proudly snagged invites to. She’d just told them during school the day before, and to no one’s surprise, Eddie tapped out before she could finish her sentence.  
               “You can keep your night of syphilis and roofies. Thanks.”  
               He received little more than an annoyed scoff in response.   
               “I’m going to have to take a pass, too,” Ben said. “Track has a late meet up tomorrow.”  
               Beverly swiveled her head in his direction like he’d just threatened her life. “What? Sweetie, do you get what this is? This party is going to be full of college kids. They’re going to be talking about this for months. You can’t just _take a pass_.”  
               Ben laughed uncomfortably. “I think I just did.”  
               Beverly’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Was he…arguing with her? “Do you have any idea what I had to do to get us in?”  
               Richie snickered. “Let’s just say, don’t be surprised if you see Vic Criss walking around with his dick out for the next few days.”  
               Beverly looked at him mildly. “Why? Is he finally coming to plug that noise hole in your face?”  
               Richie let out a loud, delighted laugh. “Yow! She bites.”  
               Beverly rolled her eyes and turned back to Ben. “Listen, I told them there’s be eight of us. If people start to flake, how does that make me look? I should’ve known Eddie would be a spacecase and bounce. But then you go and decide you’ve got better things to do? Benny, that kind of hurts.”  
               Ben looked really uncomfortable now. “It’s not that. I just…”  
               “If he wants to fuh-f-flake, let him.” Bill didn’t even look up from the notes for the next student council meeting he was flipping through with Stan. “We don’t n-need the dead weight.”  
               “I wouldn’t be dead weight.”  
               “Why aren’t you ragging on Eddie if it’s so important?” George cut in. Eddie threw him a look, but George ignored it. This was getting ridiculous.   
               Stan answered in Bill’s place. “There’s a hierarchy you really don’t seem to be getting, so I’m going to spell it out for you. Eddie’s earned his keep. Actually earned it. He’s not just clinging on to the bottom brackets, coming and going in our affairs as it strikes him. He’s done enough before for him to stay back now if he wants. Getting hired off your internship doesn’t mean you’re ready to call in your vacation time. You still have to earn it.”  
               “Wha…” George had told himself he wouldn’t fight them on stuff like this anymore. He was going to be good. He’d go along with whatever came hurling at him out of left field. But this was too much. “This isn’t a corporation. You’re high schoolers in a clique. You can’t order people around because of some convoluted social chain you made up. It’s just a party, right?”  
               Stan tilted his head a little to the side, and there was that look again. He really pulled it off better than George could ever hope to. “How stupid are you, really? We didn’t make up shit. This is nature on its primal course. This school, these people, they chose us. Whether they realize it or not, they followed that instinctual draw to those in power.”  
               George glanced at the others around them, trying to find a least one other person who thought this sounded as batshit insane to them as it did to him. But he only thing their expressions told him was that they clearly weren’t hearing anything new.  
               “Everyone had their place in the universe,” Stan continued. “We’re just ensuring they keep to it. You of all people should be starting to get that now.”  
               “Should I?”  
               “You helped that band kid learn his place.”  
               This struck George unexpectedly hard. He blinked a little, trying to find his next words. “But… that was…”  
               “It’s fine, George,” Ben said. “I’ll go. It’s fine.”  
               “What? No, you can’t just—”  
               “I said it’s _fine_.” Ben met his eyes, trying to emphasize his words. “Just let it go.”  
               George’s shoulders dropped a little in defeat.  
               “Besides,” Ben continued, “he’s right. This is like our job now. You have to do what’s expected of you, or you get fired. That’s just how it works.”  
               Beverly smiled and slowly linked her arm through Ben’s. “I knew you’d come around.”  
               The bell for next period rang out above them, and they slowly dispersed in their respective directions, Beverly still holding Ben’s arm as they went. George was about to follow after when he made the mistake of casting one last look at his brother. Bill was already watching him. George knew that look. His feet froze to the spot, and he let the rest of the school pass around him. Within the minute, the hall had cleared, saved for the two of them. A teacher passed by, and she looked like she was about to tell them to get to class – George wished she would – but she clamped her mouth shut and kept walking.  
               A palpable quiet seeped into the emptiness the mass of students had left behind. Bill let it settle over them before he spoke. “Is this ga-going to be a problem?”  
               George made a fleeting attempt to match his brother’s stare, but he couldn’t hold it. His eyes flicked down to a spot of dirt on the floor. “No.”  
                He thought he was getting braver than this. Every day, he thought he was getting just a little bit stronger, that he was that much closer to finally feeling like his own, autonomous being apart from his state-of-being as “Bill’s brother.” Then Bill would look at him like he was a disobedient dog that was one mistake away from being put down, and George would reflexively back down. No matter how far he came, his brother had become so synonymous with the concepts of fear and respect in George’s mind, George wanted to rip the entire goddamn thing out of his head right there. The idea of living the rest of his life as a comicbook zombie suddenly didn’t seem so bad.  
               Bill didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look away. The silence held for so long, George could feel a panicked rush of fight or flight surging up through his limbs. He couldn’t take this anymore. He had to get out of here. He had to end this.  
               Then Bill blinked and looked away, and the moment was over. He adjusted the strap of his bag on his shoulder and started off towards his own class, his only parting words being: “Look presentable.”  
               So here George was, a little over twenty-four hours later, standing in some shoddy convenience store off the highway, looking presentable. He stopped just inside the glass door, a loud, electronic chime signaling his entrance. He briefly glanced around at the small building and the shelves piled with cheap junk food and even cheaper alcohol, and was met by an aggressively long car honk from outside and a muffled voice shouting “HURRY UP!” He threw them a scowl before moving farther in. There wasn’t anyone else in the gas station that he could see. They were off the main highway to the city, but it was still close enough to Derry that few people would be finding themselves here this late at night. The counter behind the register was empty, too, but George could hear the shuffling of boxes coming from a backroom. The worker didn’t even bother to peak his head out.  
               George made his way up and down the aisles, trying to figure out what matched with Beverly’s incredibly helpful request of “I don’t know. Something not gross.” And Mike’s request for something high protein, low carb. George gave the shelf in front of him a useless once over. What the fuck did they think this was? It was a middle-of-nowhere gas station; not a grocery store. They probably _only_ sold the gross, generic, carb-loaded shit. After another second of this, George started to just grab things.  
               He was mentally fighting with himself over whether or not he was actually going to bother reading any of the nutrition labels on anything when something caught in the corner of his eye. He looked up and startled a little. A man was standing directly beside him now, looking over the same shelves George’s first thought was that it was the worker from the back, maybe going over the inventory. But the oversized trench coat and at least two days worth of untended chin fuzz didn’t seem like part of the uniform. He could see the actual worker behind the counter now, restocking cigarettes. So, this was just some guy then, and George had been too distracted by his stupid task to hear the door chime go off.      
               The man noticed the new attention he was getting and turned his head to George, looking a little annoyed, and George was suddenly struck by the thought that he knew this guy. He took a second, trying to place a name with the face, but nothing was sticking. He had no idea how he could know this man. He was at least in his mid to late 30s, and he didn’t look destitute or homeless, per se, but just like the kind of man whose life would lead him to a gas station in the middle of nowhere at ten o’clock at night. That profile didn’t line up with anyone he could place. But that itching feeling at the back of his head wouldn’t go away.  
               “You need something, kid?”  
               the voice snapped George back to his sense and to the fact that he’d been openly staring at this man for at least ten seconds. His face lit red. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be weird. You just…I thought you looked like a friend of mine for a second.”  
               “You got a lot of skeevy-looking older men for friends?”  
               George wasn’t sure what part of that he was supposed to respond to. “Skeevy…? No, look, it’s nothing. I’m sorry. You just caught me off guard.”  
               The man gave what was almost a shrug and turned back to the shelves. “If it’s any consolation,” he picked up a pack of gum, studied it for a second, then pocketed it without a second thought, “I wasn’t expecting me to be here either.”  
               The blaring of Bill’s car horn cut through the quiet of the store again, two short ones and one extended out for far longer than was necessary. George stormed out to the end of the small aisleway and met Bill’s annoyed stare through the glass of the door. Richie and Mike were sitting on the hood of the car now, smoking and laughing about something. Bill hit the car horn again, holding George’s glare.   
               “Two fucking seconds!” George yelled, even as he very well knew Bill couldn’t hear him. “Give me two fucking seconds!”  
               “Nice friends you got there.”  
               The man was leaning past one of the tall DVD stands at the end of the aisle, his eyebrows pinched together. The cashier had stopped restocking so he could throw an annoyed look towards the door, too.  
               “They’re not my friends,” George said. “They’re my brother’s.” With an annoyed sigh, he looked at the food he’d already picked up. It wasn’t much. “And if he’s going to be like this, he can buy the rest of their junk with his own cash.” There was little conviction behind his statement. If they sent him back in, he knew he wouldn’t refuse.  
               He approached the front register and dropped everything he’d been carrying on the counter. The cashier started to ring him up, and George watched as the total climbed higher and higher. To his extreme discomfort, he had to pull more crumbled bills out of his pocket. By the time the cashier finally stopped, the total was near fifteen dollars. That was a dollar short of all the money George had. He tried not to cringe as he placed the money on the counter.  
               “Nah, nah. Here.” The man came up beside George and pulled out his own wallet. So he did have money. “Add a pack of Marlboros, and I’ll catch the tab,” he told the cashier.  
               “You don’t have to do that.” George regretted the words as soon as he said them. If his ingrained manners put him out nearly twenty bucks, he was going to be beyond pissed off.  
               The man inclined his head towards the front door. “No more than you do.”  
               “I…what?”  
               “I’ve been in your shoes, kid. Blood or not, you can’t let’em jerk you around like they own you.”  
               Who was this guy, talking like he knew the situation at all. “It’s not like that. It’s complicated, alright?”  
               The man let out a snort. “Yeah. Sure. It’s always real complicated in high school.”  
               George felt himself bristle in indignation. “Maybe I just don’t feel like owing one to some stranger at a gas station.”     
               The car outside honked again, and George tried to stifle his cringe. One of them was bound to come busting in here after him at any second. Probably Richie, and George really didn’t need a repeat of the cafeteria entrance right now.  
               The man raised his eyebrows, as if a point had just been made, then he pulled out a twenty and slid it over to the cashier. George couldn’t help notice the wallet was plenty full. “Look, how about this,” the man said. “How about you pay me back with your word on something.”  
               That didn’t bode much better in George’s mind, but he hadn’t exactly made an effort to stop the transaction, so he let the man continue.  
               “Give me your word that when your brother and his shitty friends start ganking on your chain, you’ll start pulling back.”  
               George let out a small, bemused laugh. “Hey, no offense, but you really don’t know the situation. It’s not that simple.”  
               “You want to pay for all this then?”  
               George shut his mouth. _Godammit_.  
               “Just humor me,” the man said. “You can walk out of here not giving two shits one way or the other, but just play me like you do and promise you’ll stop letting them run your life.”  
               The cashier counted out the change and handed it over with the pack of cigarettes, then he pushed the plastic bag full of junk food towards George. George took it warily, still unsure if he was accepting a gift he wanted to take.  
               “Why do you care?” George said.  
               “Like I said, I been there. Call it the adult in me looking to feel useful for once.”  
               That was a little more honest that George had expected.  
               “So is it a deal then?” the man said.  
               George sighed. What the hell. Just humor the guy. “Sure. Deal.” He gestured vaguely to the bag in his hand. “And thank you. For this.”  
               “Don’t mention it.” The man had already opened the carton of cigarettes and was holding one in his teeth as rifled through his pockets for a lighter. George glanced over at the cashier to see if he’d make the man go outside, but the cashier was gone, and the faint sound of shuffling boxes could be heard coming from the back room again. “Here.”  
               George didn’t have time to think and reflexively grabbed for whatever had just been tossed at his face. It was a cigarette. “Oh, uh, I don’t—”  
               “You need that more than I do.” The man checked his pockets one last time, but came up empty. He glanced towards the back room once, then swiped two of the lighters sitting for sale on the counter. He threw one of those at George, who, again, caught it on reflex. The man started to walk away, clicking the wheel of the lighter as he went, leaving George reeling at the small, newly stolen object that was virtually useless to him.  
               “Oh.” The man turned back around, the still unlit cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. “I never got your name, kid.”  
               For a brief second, George wondered if he should lie. But he batted that thought away. “George.”  
               “Nice to know you. I don’t know if our paths will cross again, but if they do, call me Tony.” He turned to leave again, holding the lighter back up to cigarette as he flicked the wheel.  
               “Call you…wait.” It clicked. Why this man looked so familiar. Why George would’ve never made the connection before. He’d only ever seen a picture of the man maybe two or three times, and it was only in passing. He’d never really cared about the man’s face; just his words.   
               But this guy wasn’t Tony Greer. Of fucking course he wasn’t. That was inconceivable. What uncanny and wholly impossible string of events could possibly transpire to bring Greer not only from California to Maine, but to this one specific gas station outside of Derry at this one specific time when George Denbrough, _inarguably_ his biggest fan, was the only other person there.   
               That wasn’t happening.  
               George wanted to call out to him, he wanted to say something, put this stupid notion to rest, but the lighter gave one last click and the small flame flared to life. George could see it in the reflection of the glass. He took a sudden step back, his breath catching in his throat. Something changed. For a brief moment, barely a blink of a second, Tony’s reflection in the dirty glass looked wrong. There was a monster in the glass. It was there and gone so quickly, to was more emotion than any kind of image that George could understand. He thought he saw teeth, or jagged spikes where teeth should be. The only thing he had time to focus on were the eyes. Bright orange and burning and a million miles deep.   
               In the next instant, the image passed, and the only thing George could see burning in the reflection was the orange of the lighter. It had been some crazy trick of the light, the shadows of the dim store contorting over the already deformed reflections off the cheap glass. Tony lit the cigarette and walked out the door, the electronic chime greeting him there.  
               It snapped George back to his senses. He looked down at the lighter still in his hand, then glanced towards the backroom. No one was coming out. He nervously bit at his bottom lip, then pocketed the lighter and quickly left the store himself. He had to catch that man. He had to catch…Tony? This was insane. He ran past Bill’s car, and Richie and Mike still sitting on the hood.  
               “Hey, whoa, what’s the rush?” Richie called after him. “You lifting shit now?”  
               The parking lot was deserted, the only movement coming from a piece of trash scraping across the pavement in the faint wind. Where could that man have possibly gone so quickly?  
               “ _Georgie_.”  
               George turned back to the car and to Bill staring at him incredulously from the rolled down driver’s side window. Bill raised a hand at him as if to say _what the fuck are you doing?  
              _George didn’t really have an answer for that. He had no idea what he was doing. “T-the man,” he stammered out.  
               Bill just blinked at him dully. Mike had slid from the car in favor of leaning against it, and Richie just propped his upper body on the roof, both o f them giving George the same look. He assumed the others in the car were looking at him, too, but it was too dark for him to make them out without some effort. He didn’t want to see them anyway.  
               “Where’d he go,” he tried again. “The one who came out before me.”  
               Mike and Richie shared a look that George didn’t know how to read.  
               “Bill, you brother’s losing it,” Richie said.  
               “Wh-what are you talking about?” Bill said. “No one c-came out ba-before you.”  
               “What? No, he was right there. I followed him out. He was—”  
               George stopped. Bill looked as if he might actually drive away leave him here if George kept talking. He gave one las desperate look to Richie and Nike, looking for some small sort of validation from one of them. Mike let out a laugh, shaking his head and moving to get back in the car. Richie just shrugged and slid off the hood, flicking his cigarette stub out into the parking lot.  
               George’s breath was coming heavy now. He checked the parking lot and road beyond it one last time and thought he might finally be losing his mind.


	6. Firsts and Lasts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love writing people doing exciting and edgy things while smoking weed because the most exciting thing I ever did high was go watch Boss Baby with one of my supervisors from work.  
>  That is to say, there’s suddenly a lot of hard drug use in here and it gets kind of dark, so uhhhh,,,,*finger guns* you know. I read the entirety of The Goldfinch in the middle of writing this, and it might’ve taken more inspiration than I’d intended.  
>  Also, I’m so sorry this took forever. It kept getting longer and longer with each rewrite. This is only half of the full chapter, but it ended up being some 20,000 words and I decided to split it here. I’ll post the second half within the next week or so since it’s already basically done.

     George couldn’t make out the conversations happening around him anymore than he could make out the details of the trees smearing past the window. He could still feel the lighter in his pocket, weighing him down like stones.   
      _They’re taking you to the pier, Georgie. Jump in. The water’s great._  
As the dark highway road gave way to more lighted and alive cityscape, George’s attention drifted back to the present. It had been a long time since he’d left Derry. They crossed a bridge and the lights of downtown stretched out in front of him, and he thought Bill could stop the car right here on the side of the road and tell George to get out and George would have nothing but the humanity of all those strangers to depend on. He wasn’t even sure how to get back to Derry from here. It didn’t seem so far-fetched the longer he thought about it. This whole trip could be another part of their initiation, leaving him to find his own way home.  
     After a while of sitting on this view, they turned off onto an exit and the lights of the city fell out of eyesight behind the overpass and a dense cluster of old apartment buildings. The farther they drove from the city proper, the more sparse the landscape became again and a restlessness stirred in the car. George was still small enough to fit into most tight spaces, including the corner of the backseat, leaving just enough room for Stan, Richie, and Ben. Beverly was in Ben’s lap with her legs stretched out onto Richie’s. The sides of her boots touched Stan which he made clear he wasn’t happy about, but she and Richie moved so much in the confined space, their arms gesticulating widely as they switched between loudly joking and loudly arguing, that pushing the matter would be a waste of breath.  
     Stan had larger issues to be upset about, namely the fact that he’d been relegated to sit in the back with the children. He usually stepped in as the passenger-side navigator when they didn’t have Eddie’s innate sense for direction with them, but that was when they traveled in two vehicles or there was only a few of them at a time. They used Mike’s truck when they needed to fit them all together in one vehicle, but with it in the shop again, Bill’s car was their only option, and the idea of trying to fit someone Mike’s size in the already limited space of the backseat was almost funny. Mike threw instigating glances over his shoulder every so often to keep Stan riled, but Stan’s only acknowledgment came in passive-aggressive jabs at Mike's navigating abilities.  
     “Bold choice taking us on the scenic route instead of, you know, the good one.”  
     “How would you know?”  
     “Because I have eyes and can read road signs, Michael.”  
     Signs of civilization were sparse and George couldn’t imagine how much farther they had to go with the city already so far behind them. When the car did finally begin to slow, there was a dark expanse of nothing but forest and pastures around them, and an almost unbearable dread iced over George’s skin. This was it. This was where they were going to leave him. Not even in the city. Not anywhere.   
     “There,” Mike was saying, pointing into the trees.  
     Bill was leaned forward against the steering wheel. “Where?”  
    “Right fucking there, man.”  
    George’s hand was slowly sliding its way to the door handle, his breathing becoming harder and harder to control. They were really going to do this. He glanced to Ben, hoping to see some kind of reassurance or solidarity or just answer to what was happening in his face, but Ben was staring out the window where Mike had pointed. “No, I see it,” he said. “Right there. There's an opening. See?”  
They turned onto a dirt path that was nearly imperceptible in the dark, a dense forest of trees pressing in from both sides. Whatever light the moon had given them struggled to find its way through the thick branches, suddenly shifting the world into nothing but the headlights of the car. There was a small turn in the road, then they saw it. A porch light shining out at them like a beacon. George’s fingers didn't leave the door handle.  
     The dirt road, made more from years of heavy tire tracks than any intentional effort, and the trees bordering it ended abruptly at the same time. The tree line widened out into a lawn and the worn dirt of the road spread out in every direction, indicating the lawn to be a makeshift parking lot. There were already cars parked everywhere and anywhere they fit with little regard to organization, and it left them to park farther back from the house. The light of the moon came through easier here, the tops of the trees plenty far apart to reach farther than the lights of the house, but it did little quell the uneasy feeling in George’s stomach as he got out. He stood there a second while the others got out, and observed the house and the people milling around outside it. Most stayed to the patio or wandered back inside through the propped open front door; a few kept to themselves by the cars, creating their own world outside of the party. His eyes stopped on a group sitting in the cab of a pickup truck a few feet away. The windows were rolled down and Neil Young was coming from the radio. George knew this song; his father would play it sometimes when he was working late at night. The song distracted George so much he flinched when one of the girls in the cab shrieked, and the others around her started to laugh.  
     “Tyler, I swear,” she yelled. The rest of the conversation was too far away to hear.  
     Bill hit the side of George’s shoulder as he passed and gestured towards the house. “C’mon.” George didn’t miss the way the rest of them stood back, waiting for Bill to pass before following after him. The wind picked up just enough to bring a sudden wave of rustling through the trees lining the road and George spared a glance behind him, the uneasy feeling growing as he stared at the black void that swallowed the trees and the road. They'd left the Earth behind and escaped to this other dimension. He pulled his eyes away and quickened his pace to catch up with the rest of the group.  
The house was one story, but even lighted by little more than the porch lights, it was easily more than some cheap cabin stuck out in the middle of the woods. The tended flower bed and bushes surrounding the raised wooden foundation were beautiful and well cared for. Long, glittering wind chimes much like the ones on the Denbrough’s own back patio kept sentry at the top of the porch steps. The porch was a wraparound with chairs and cushioned benches placed throughout, most of the chairs looking like they’d been dragged from their usual placements, whether it was somewhere else on the porch or what were clearly dining room chairs from inside.  
     As they got closer, attention started to draw, mild curiosity that came and went with a glance for most of them. A few looks lingered and George tucked himself further into his jacket when he saw they were lingering on him. Bill and the rest were less than a year from college and blended in as well as anybody, if a little young. It was a long stretch for anyone to believe George was anything more than a high school freshman. One boy quirked a smile when he saw George and said something to the girl beside him; she laughed:  
      _Someone brought their little brother._   
     George felt a heat on his neck and moved a little faster, putting himself in the middle of their group like they could hide him. He was so distracted, he hadn’t noticed Mike stop in front of him until he’d run straight into him, hard enough for it to hurt on George’s end, but Mike barely gave him so much as an annoyed glance. They’d all stopped, standing just a few feet short of the porch steps. He saw Bill’s face first, and the look of it didn’t register right at first. He couldn’t place it. Something like a wild animal suddenly caught in a spotlight. George followed his eyes to the porch.   
     A man was leaned forward, his arms crossed on the porch railing so his beer bottle swung slowly, back and forth, in his hand. He took a slow draw off the joint in his other hand. He was hard to make out at his first, his face briefly silhouetted by the light directly behind him mounted beside the front door. Even as George’s eyes adjusted, the man and his placid expression were hard to place. He knew their group, clearly, and had been waiting for their attention. Then he grinned, unpleasant and slow, and familiarity clicked. George had only met Patrick Hockstetter a handful of times, maybe, really only knowing him in passing and by the stories that circulated the town, but he remembered that self-serving grin. Patrick looked distinctly different from the boy George had seen the last few times, the last time being months ago. He seemed almost approachable. Cleaner. His hair was shorter with what looked like some effort put into styling it. He wasn’t wearing a graphic T or dirty jeans with holes slashed up the legs, just a dark shirt with an open button-up and a hoodie thrown over. He looked like any number of the other college kids around them. But George found it hard to believe that Patrick actually had anything to do with college.  
     Bill cast a glare at Beverly, who just threw up a hand to say Sorry! I didn’t know!  
     “Well, well. Party’s finally here, right?” Patrick took another hit, unhurried. “I was getting worried you weren’t gonna show, Billy.” Even as he said this, his attention fell over the rest of them in turn. It caught when it fell on Richie. “Tozier,” he said amiably, old friends meeting again. Richie’s jaw tightened. “I heard about that stunt you pulled. I’m impressed they let off your leash long enough to pop something off like that. Wish I could’ve seen it.”  
     “We can reenact it for you,” Beverly said.  
     “Beverly,” Bill hissed.   
     The reaction was so severe and so out of place, it struck at George uncomfortably. Bill was scared. There was no other word for it. If anyone else noticed or thought it strange, they didn’t show it. They were either fixed on Patrick or distinctly away from him. Patrick for his part looked pleased. He was enjoying this, whatever it was. He went back to Richie. “Your shadow ain’t so dark today. Where’s short stack?”  
     “Not his scene,” Richie said, a wry smile on his face. “Where’s rat tail?”  
     Patrick gave a one-sided shrug. “Prison, maybe. I don’t know. I stopped keeping track when it stopped being my problem. Why? Is Kasprbrak stabbing people now, too?” He laughed. “Now that I’d pay to see.”  
     “Prison?” Mike cut in. “Henry’s not going in on an insanity plea?”  
     “Like I said,”—Patrick’s expression dropped, already losing interest in this line of discussion—”I stopped keeping track. I can’t even tell you where the ones we came here with went.”  
     “Belch is off with his girl somewhere,” a voice behind him said. George had seen the group standing there, leaned up against the house, but hadn’t given them much thought. He knew Victor Criss immediately. “Don’t expect to run into him anytime soon.”  
     “What a shame,” Stan murmured dryly.  
     Patrick’s attention had waned to George, like he’d only just now noticed the boy standing there. “You in the babysitting business now?”    
     “I can stab people, too,” George said, the words out before he could think about how stupid it sounded. He didn’t have to see at Bill to know the expression that was falling over his face. Patrick, though, let out a surprised laugh.   
     “Y-you didn’t tell me you wa-were going to be here,” Bill said. He gave a pointed look towards Criss, who just shrugged. As far as George could tell, Criss looked much the same, not even bothering to wear a shirt that didn’t have what looked like dirt stains lining the hem. The other standing with them, two guys and a girl, were strangers who watched their conversation with bland interest.  
     “Who do you think got you in, Billy? I got half these cokeheads tearing up my phone on a daily. Lot of people needing me around these days. Besides,”—he took another drag, letting the word sit in the air, then he turned away from the porch railing. Slowly, he made his way down the stairs to them — to Richie. Patrick proffered the mostly gone roach like a mock peace offering. “—we gotta catch up, right? It’s been a while.” Richie didn’t move. If anything, he froze. The moment couldn’t have lasted more than three or four seconds, but it dragged like a small eternity. They were just goin to stay there staring each other down until either one of them caved or the Earth caved in around them.  
     “As fun as I’m sure that sounds,” Beverly put her arm through Richie’s, pulling herself close. “This night’s supposed to be for us. I’m sure you can catch up later.”  
     Bill looked about ready to say something — Ben, too, glancing between the two of them like his fight or flight responses at war — but Patrick spoke first. “I thought we were pals, Rich. You got better things to do?”  
     Richie gave Beverly a meaningful look, one she didn’t seem to like at all. “Eddie would lose his fucking mind if he found out,” she said.  
     Richie pulled his arm from hers. “Good thing Eddie’s not my mom.”  
     He took the mostly burnt out joint; Patrick smiled. He slid an arm around Richie’s shoulders. “I got some other friends dying to meet you, too.” Richie didn’t say anything, just blew out his own heavy cloud of smoke as he let Patrick lead him back up the stairs.  
     Bill heaved out a sigh, running a hand through his hair, and called out to Patrick before they could get too far: “D-did you a-at least bring it with you?”  
     Patrick stopped and looked back at him, impassive. “Why would I?”  
     “You n-n-knew we were c-coming.”  
     Patrick seemed to consider this. “I don’t know. We’ll see how the night plays out, then you can ask me again.”  
     “He better come back conscious, or I’m—” Beverly’s words were cut off by Bill’s grip on her arm, so visibly tight it brought back phantom pain pricks under George’s own skin.   
     Patrick smirked at her and they continued up the stairs, disappearing into the house. Beverly yanked her arm out of Bill’s grip. A hundred conversations seemed to play out between them in a single look, an old discussion they’d worn out again and again.   
     “You know what this is,” Bill said finally.  
     “I know what it is to you,” Beverly spat back.  
     Stan crossed his arms, already looking exhausted by the evening. “Don’t act like you’re above this. Who went crawling to Patrick with their little Betty Henderson problems?”  
     Ben looked at Beverly with surprise. “Wait, the Betty Henderson thing was you?”  
     Beverly ignored him, still focused on Stan. “Fuck you. You were all a part of that.”   
    “Just admit you need him as much as any of us.”  
     She turned back to Bill. “Richie’s not going to come back one day, and it’s going to be on your hands.”  
     Bill looked wholly unaffected. “Are you done?”  
     “I—”  
     “Leave it. J-just leave it, Bev.”  
     George wasn’t sure what kind of response she’d expected to elicit from Bill of all people. Without another word, she turned on her heels and started up the stairs and into the house.   
     Bill looked to Ben. “Go with her. Make sure s-she doesn’t d-do something stupid.”  
     Ben’s brow creased. “Like what?”   
     “Like ruin this.”  
     Ben clearly had more question, but with his better senses he withheld them and did as he was told, following after where Beverly had gone into the house.  
     “I don’t get it,” George said after he was gone. “What’s Patrick going to do?”  
     “That’s the question, isn’t it,” Stan said. He turned to Bill. “What now?”  
     “Give it until midnight. We’ll see h-how he is and fa-f-figure it out from there.”  
     “If we can find him,” Mike said.   
     “So, he’s — what — a drug dealer?” George tried again. He knew about the weed, obviously, and a few of their close calls when they got pulled over, hiding bags of pills or powder wherever they’d fit, or stuffing them behind the toilets at school when campus security dropped surprise locker inspections. The time Justin Dern got caught with a needle in his backpack and half the school was whispering his name like an old curse as students hurriedly cleaned out their lockers as inconspicuously as they could before the drug dogs were brought in. Richie, Beverly, and Mike were only seen in passing for most of that day, and they looked wide-eyed and on edge when they were around, like they’d had to make the rushed decision of using half their stash on the spot or throwing it away. Bill had looked only marginally better, his default calm smothering most of his demeanor save for a few ticks, and it was the first time George wondered exactly how much he was using. Even Ben had an anxiety about him, George once overhearing him asking Richie if he was sure he’d gotten it all and Richie just laughing in a jittery, not in the least reassuring way and saying, “I fucking hope so.” Stan and Eddie had watched all of this with pained looks of distaste.  
     Much the same look George was getting from the other three now. “He deals a lot of things,” Stan said. “He has connections you won’t get from anyone else around here.”  
     “Connections to what?” George asked. “What happened to Betty Henderson?”  
     “Something you don’t need to be talking about around other people,” Mike said, rubbing at the side of his nose uncomfortably.  
     “Someone put in an anonymous tip that Betty was planning to bomb the school,” Stan said, garnering a look from Mike. “The police were called in and guess whose locker was suspiciously full of all the parts needed to assemble a makeshift bomb?” There was a bit of pride in his voice, like it had all been his idea.  
     George thought he’d heard the worst of the things they’d done, but this was…  
     “Why?” he asked.  
     Stan actually lowered his voice. “Are you really still asking that by now?”  
     “But what does Patrick have to do with this?”  
     “Where do you think the parts came from?” Mike said. “And most of the idea.” Stan’s mouth pressed into an annoyed line.  
     Bill was growing restless from all the standing around and was messing with his hair again. “And if yu-you’re smart, you’ll keep him close.”   
     “Me?” Like Patrick was some family heirloom to be passed on to the next generation.  
     “You a-always want at least wa-one person without a c-c-conscious at your call.”   
     "Just one?" George muttered.  
     Without warning, Bill pushed George forward towards the house, clearly signaling the end of the conversation. “Go.”  
     The muffled music George had heard thrumming out from the house grew louder as they walked in. Most of the rooms were dark, lit by a few lamps. They were packed with twenty-somethings George could barely see but doubted he’d recognize anyway, the only good look he could get at anyone’s face was the girl asleep on a settee by the entryway, the light streaming in from outside illuminating her dreary features. She was so still she looked nearly dead. George watched her out of the corner of his eye for some kind of movement, then looked her full on when he didn’t see any. The rise and fall of her chest was practically imperceptible, and he was so focused on watching for it — images flashed in his head of the police showing up and his face somehow ending up on the ten o’clock news because of the girl who overdosed at a party — he almost tripped over a stray beer bottle on the floor. They were strewn all over the hallway along with plastic cups, and, off to the side, the dirt of a knocked over potted plant. The music was loud, but it wasn’t exactly the generic pop house style he’d expected. It was far too mellow, the beat too slow, for anyone to dance to.   
     The first room they came to, a sitting room where the music seemed to be originating from, had a coffee table at its centered that was covered in a disorganized spread of red solo cups. Without a word, Mike pushed one into George’s hand. He tried to do the same for Stan, but Stan made no move to take it. Mike had to yell to be heard over the music. “What, are you too good to drink now, too?”  
     “You don’t know what’s in that.”  
     “Yeah, thanks, Eddie.”  
     Stan rolled his eyes. “You know, if you want to get spiked ten minutes through the door, go ahead.”  
     Mike let out an incredulous laugh. “I mean, it’s a party, right? What’d we even come here for?”  
     “You say that like this was my idea.”  
     “Just take it, man.”  
     “I told you I don’t want it.”  
     “Since when do you even care? The stuff we used to do at parties—”  
     “Sorry if this blows your fucking mind, but things change when you up and leave someone for two years.”  
     Mike blinked in surprise. Stan did, too. He’d practically yelled into the next room and was pressing his mouth into a line like he could swallow the words back. He flicked a glance at Bill, but Bill’s attention had long been taken by someone else in the room.  
     “Enjoy those ten minutes you’ll spend conscious tonight.” Stan turned quickly, bumping into George as pushed into the room’s small crowd of people and to the doorway.  
     Mike cursed under his breath and followed after him.  
     George was left standing there alone with his cup, a small bit of the pungent beer splashed on his shirt. His mother was going to love that. He looked back to where Bill had been, but he’d disappeared, too. That figured. George was glad for the cup of only so he had something to do with his hands as his eyes darted around the dark room. He didn’t know what else to do other than look like he had a vague purpose for standing there like an idiot. He should’ve listened to himself. He never should’ve come here. He didn’t care about any of that bullshit with Eddie and earning your vacation days or whatever they were going on about. There was no reason for him to be here. He’d thought it had been so he could prove his place in the group, but clearly not since everyone had ditched him without a second thought. They didn’t give a shit what he did.   
     He frowned down at the dark liquid. Last time he’d drank beer was the night he’d fallen off the roof, and the smell of it made his stomach turn at the memory. He studied it for a second, unsure what Stan had been implying. What do you even spike a drink with? He’d always thought that meant alcohol in the punch at high school chaperoned events, but what did it call for when the drink was already alcoholic? Acid tabs? Was that something people put in drinks? George put the cup back on the table with the others and wandered away in the direction Stan and Mike had gone.   
    The house was much bigger than he’d expected. When he thought he had to have seen it all, he found himself in another new room or hallway, just as many people, just as much sound. He opened one door and had to double back at the sudden glare of light that assaulted his eyes.   
     “Whoa, Jailbait, you looking for something?”  
     It only took a second for his eyes to readjust themselves. A group of three guys were standing around an island counter that was cluttered with more cups and beer bottles, most of them still unopened. From the clean, white walls and well-organized pantry that stood half-open, it was obviously a kitchen not used to housing this kind of event. There were niche figurines of chickens or Dutch children in clogs. There was a large stand of a dog on its back, positioned like it’s supposed to be holding a wine bottle that conspicuously wasn’t there anymore. The suburban housewife touches seeping from the decorations was somehow vying for the top spot of most disorienting thing he’d experienced that night  
     “Uh, no, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to come in here.”  
     “Who are you?” The guy on the far right asked. He was blonde and wearing a fleece zip up with the collar turned that made him look like exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be standing in a kitchen like this. “You come with someone?”  
     “I told you the middle schoolers were sneaking in here,” one of the other guys said, laughing. “Trav’s started selling to them, now they won’t go away.”  
     “I’m not in middle school.” George hesitated. “I’m sixteen.”  
     The same guy snorted. “Yeah, totally.”  
     “What, are you going to ID me?” Adding quickly in case they actually tried: “I don’t have a license.”  
     “Calm down, we’re not the police.”  
     “But this is my house and I want to know how these randos keep getting in here,” the blonde guy said, vaguely waving his bottle in George’s direction.  
    “Oh, yeah, security’s real tight.” The two guys at the counter fell into badly stifled drunk laughter at the look he threw them.   
“Whatever,” the apparent host said in a breath. “You want something or not, kid?”  
“I mean…” There were two-liters of soda in among the bottles and he would’ve taken one just to keep more people from trying to give him things, but when he approached the island, one of the boys there hefted a bottle in his hand, almost like he was going to throw it. “Heads up.”   
     George was so startled by the sudden object coming at his face, he almost missed it. He caught it at the last possible second and elicited an ecstatic “Oh, shit!” from the same guy, like he hadn’t expected George to actually be fast enough to keep from getting concussed.  
     “What the fuck, dude?” The guy beside him yelled, more in surprise than anything.   
     “I told you stop throwing shit or you’re cleaning this whole dump yourself,” the host yelled just as loudly.   
     “What? He caught it, didn’t he?”  
     “Fucking idiot.”  
     There was a glass door past the island that seemed to lead out into the backyard and occasionally had more college kids slipping in and out of the room. Two of them on their way out recognized the other guys and stopped to talk, mercifully dragging the others' attention away from George for the moment. He was still close enough to the island to reach it, and he debated putting the bottle back while they weren’t looking.   
     “Something wrong with it?”  
     George looked up at the blond guy's voice. “What?”  
     “You’ve been staring at that like you don’t know how to open it.”  
     “No, I’m—”  
     “Just pop it off. You don’t need an opener or anything. Here.” He pushed off the counter and took the bottle, popping the top off in one smooth motion.  
     George took the bottle back with a muttered thanks. The host was watching him now, watching George still make no move to drink from the bottle. George wanted to turn and leave, just ditch the bottle somewhere else in the house, but this guy wouldn’t stop staring him down.  
     “Is this, like, your first drink?” he said. “Just go for it, man.”  
     “It’s not that.” George looked down at the bottle.  
     “There’s nothing weird in it. It was sealed shut.”  
     George flushed a little. “Yeah. Obviously.”  
     “Then just go for it.” The others had zoned in on their conversation. They were all watching him with that same look of patronizing amusement. His throat constricted every time he thought about drinking from the bottle, just to get this over with, just to get them to leave him alone, and he took a split second to weigh his odds of getting out of the room before it all came hurling back out of his stomach, and if he was willing to take the chance.   
     “God, he’s really never done this before, has he?” One of the newcomers were saying.   
     “That’s adorable.”  
     George took a swig before his body could realize what was happening. The drink was quick, barely long enough for anything to come out, but enough for him to catch a familiarity in the after taste.   
     “C’mon, what was that?” One of the guys called. “You gotta get in there.” They were laughing.   
     George went for it again, holding it as long as he could before his throat really did push back, which wasn’t really very long at all. Maybe a second or two more. The beer was far from great, but it was easier than it had been with the cheap, bitter stuff from before. He was afraid they’d make him keep going until he finished half the bottle, but a few of them cheered when he came back for air. It struck another uncomfortable pang of familiarity. That intoxicating moment of acceptance from a group that’d sooner leave him to rot in a field than give him the time of day. He couldn’t understand why people got so excited about watching minors struggle to keep alcohol down, but he took advantage of the moment and, with a vague nod of acknowledgment, slipped out of the room before anyone could stop him.  
     His pace didn’t slow when the door shut behind him. It didn’t slow until he was a few rooms away, back in the dark and noise and throng of strangers. He fell back against a wall with a heavy breath and let his shoulders finally relax. There was a bookshelf beside him already littered with empty bottles and cups and he automatically moved to put his own there but stopped himself. There was a thin haze starting to form in his head, making his vision a little slower to adjust with the movement of his eyes. He played back the events of the night — of the last month; of his whole life — in his head, and they were still clear and present, but maybe just a little farther away now. It was. Nice. Nice enough for him to ignore the sour taste still stuck to the roof of his mouth. He kept the bottle and worked on it a little at a time as he started back through the house to look for anyone he knew.  
     He thought he saw Bill once, on one of the couches all the way on the other side of the room. It was hard to tell in the terrible lighting and the silhouettes of strangers closed in around him. The girl to his right was getting closer and closer, taken to whispering in his ear to be heard over the music and touching his arm for good measure. George had the compulsion to go over and tell her Bill wasn’t even eighteen yet. He wondered if she’d even care. Bill would be furious either way, so worked up his words would be tripping over themselves like a crowd running from a fire. George chuckled to himself. It’d almost be worth his inevitable death just to see it. Not ten minutes later, he found Beverly when she hurried past him in the hallway, giving no sign of noticing him there. Ben wasn’t far behind her, walking much slower and with a resigned look on his face.  
     “You don’t know where Bill is, do you?” He asked in lieu of a greeting. George gave a half-shrug and threw his arm back behind him.   
     “Down there somewhere, I think,” he said.  
     “Thanks.” Ben was about to continue on, but he stopped and did a kind of double-take at George, like the details of him weren’t lining up right in his head. It was just a quick second glance, barely long enough to be noticeable, before he went on to catch up with Beverly. George didn’t have the energy to dwell on it, and within a few more drinks from his bottle, he all but forgot about it entirely.   
     He dropped his search for the rest of their group after that. There was nothing he could do once he found them, and his thought processes were growing a little too fuzzy for him to think that far ahead anyway. He knew about where Bill was, and that was all he needed to make sure he could get home. It wasn’t long before he knew the whole layout of the house. He was growing familiar with the decorations and pictures on the walls and end tables. He recognized the party's host in them, and the rest of his upper middle-class family. They didn’t look like the type to be cool with having their painstakingly pristine house in the woods trashed by college kids.   
     George finished off the bottle and considered going back to the kitchen to get another one, even if he thought he really might throw up if he made himself force down any more. He was still debating it when he noticed something off one of the hallways he hadn’t noticed before. Two girls passed in front of him and opened a door he’d previously assumed was a coat closet or something else mundane. As they talked, there was the muted sound of heels on wooden boards and she slowly descended down stairs he couldn’t see. The second girl closed the door behind her, leaving George to stare at the space where they’d just been. Something new. He glanced around, not sure what he expected to find but feeling anxious anyway, but no one had paid him, the girls, or the door any attention. He moved to the door, and, tentatively, he pulled it open, looking back once to again confirm that no one was coming at him for this. The stairs led down into more dim lighting. There was a hazy quality to the light like it was trying to push its already weak reach through a thin smog. He could see a TV from there set in a far corner and the familiar image of MTV bumpers flickering across the screen. George let himself step forward onto the top of the staircase and quietly shut the door behind him, shutting the music out with the rest of the house and bringing the top of the stairs into complete darkness.   
     He kept his hand on the door knob and took a breath. Then another. The muffled music sounded like something out of a dream. Something happening in another person’s reality. He thought he could’ve stayed planted right there for the rest of the night if they let him, but the sound of steps on boards startled his eyes back open and got him moving on again. The person passing him going up either didn’t notice him or didn’t care, not even bothering to make room as they passed and knocked into George’s shoulder.  
The basement was set-up as a lounge and a recreational area, and looked like two rooms that had had their dividing wall taken out, the staircase acting as the new dividing line between them. Most sitting space was to the right with the TV. Both the TV stand and the bookshelf beside it were overfilled with VHS tapes and a few vinyls, many of which had been shuffled through during the night and were laying around out of their boxes. There was an expensive-looking radio set-up on the opposite wall, but noticeably no turntable, like the vinyls were just for show.  
The smell of pot made the air hang tight and heavy and mixed strangely with the general smell of humans cordoned in a stuffy subroom. George didn’t know if it was the alcohol slushing around in his brain, but standing there in the dark and the haze, he couldn’t make any of it feel real. He made himself focus on the weight of his shoes against the floor, the feeling of his clothes against his skin, his breathing, the pain in his dry eyes. But none of it brought his senses back to a focused point, and the longer he stood there, staring at the flashing, erratic lights of the TV, the more he doubted he was even awake.  
     No one else in the room paid him any attention making him feel oddly compelled to watch them instead. There was plenty of room for the number of them, but most of them were pushed up against each other, some sitting in laps or just leaned against each other like a litter of baby animals with no concept for personal space. Their conversations were low and muted and interspersed with hits off joints that were passed back and forth.  
     George watched one group with a rapt fascination. They were off against one of the walls away from the couch and lounge chairs. Their conversations were whispered, heads leaned together, but they couldn’t seem to stop laughing to themselves. Before George could think, he was in front of them. He hadn’t told himself to walk, he didn’t even remember doing it, but it was too late to take it back now. They were looking at this sudden interloper, waiting for him to say something instead of just standing there like a weirdo. It had seemed really simple in his head, but he was losing his trail of thought and had to struggle to remember why he’d even walked over here.  
     “I’ve… I’ve never…”  
     They waited for him to say more, but he’d lost the thought again.   
     “What?” one of the guys prompted. He was wearing a leather jacket covered in crooked patches and that looked far too hot to be wearing right now.  
     “Sorry.” George let out a nervous laugh. “I’m not supposed to be here. But I’m here, and my brother’s never let me have weed before because he says it’s his and he doesn’t want to waste it on me. So I’ve never actually had it before. I mean, I’ve been in the car with them before so I think got a contact high, but that might’ve just been in my head. I don’t know.”  
     God, his heart was pounding. It was suddenly incredibly hot in that confined room and it was making him a little sick. He tried to focus on that instead of the looks the group in front of him was cutting between him and each other. Patch Jacket looked George over again. “Are you seriously asking me to just give you weed?”  
     “Yes.” George was still holding the empty bottle and thumping it anxiously against the side of his leg. He’d come over on the whim of a thought, and now he had to see it through, no matter how stupid this whole thing was. He knew he shouldn’t have come over here. He just wanted this guy to tell him to fuck off already so he could leave. If he wanted weed so badly, he could just try asking Bill again. A lot had changed since the last time, and even if that didn’t work, George had always considered asking Richie. But asking Richie came with the added consequence of him inevitably talking about it to everyone.  
     “You think it works like that?” Patch Jacket asked.  
     “I don’t know. Is this working?” It was a genuine question.  
     A few of them snorted out a laugh. “Just fucking give it to him, dude,” the girl to Patch Jacket’s right said, lulling her head a little where it rested against the wall. The guy to her right had his eyes closed and head leaned back, and George had assumed he was asleep until he spoke: “Yeah. Every kid needs a first dealer.”  
     “Shut the fuck up,” Patch Jacket said with no actual emotion. “Here. I guess you can just ask.”  
     “Oh.” George blinked at the small pipe being offered to him. He took it with a tentative hand and looked it over. “Uh.”  
     “Seriously?”  
     “I told you I’ve never done this before!”  
     He couldn’t have been more than another fifteen minutes before the quiet of the room was suddenly burst through, like someone had turned a radio on high and a conversation surged through. George's eyes followed it to the other half of the basement, the side he’d ignored since it looked like no one was over there. A door had opened and bright light was filtering out, casting a glow on the couple leaving the room, the girl looking a bit unstrung, her eyes unfocused and her steps shaky, and the guy leading her to the stairs, who looked a little unstrung himself. He seemed more amused than worried, and he caught the eyes of Patch Jacket and the rest of his group.  
     “What the fuck,” the girl beside Patch Jacket yelled. “Again?”   
     “I told her,” the guy at the stairs replied back.  
     She stood up, and the other three followed after her in their own time, leaving George to watch them from the floor. He frowned after them as they took the stairs. They disappeared and the sound of the door to the main house slamming shut followed soon after. His attention drew back to the light and the door that was now slightly ajar. Another door he hadn’t noticed before in this strange expanding house of mysteries. A different dimension where their rules of logic didn’t apply. George had to hold the wall to stand, and the inside of his head gave a sudden, violent whirl, like someone giving a hard shake to the contents of a water bottle. It took a second for the black spots overlapping his eyesight to disappear, and for some reason this whole struggle made him giggle. He followed along the wall to the stairs then stopped at the railing where he could see into the other side of the basement more clearly. The piles of boxes and pieces of furniture draped in sheets suggested it was a storage area, and the slit of light from the side room fell perfectly on a pile of dusty framed portraits. George drew closer to the door, passing through the unearthly mist of the room like a ghost.  
     Looking in, the first thing he found was Patrick, which seemed very right. He was leaned up against the back wall, watching the room, talking to the people beside him without looking at them. George could only see three or four people in the room from where he stood, but judging by the sound there had to be at least a few more. One of the people, the one sitting on the couch in the center of the room, had his head pushed back over the back of the cushions and his hands over his face. The girl sitting on the arm rest beside him was laughing and asking him if he was okay. It only lasted a second before he gave a shuddering breath and let his hands fall back down but left his head back, staring blankly at the ceiling. George had recognized Richie on sight from the bracelets and cracked black nail polish against the mess of black hair that just looked savaged now. Bedhead in the sense of someone had been tossing with nightmares the entire night.   
     “Is it hitting yet?" the girl asked, leaning in.  
     “Honey, which one?” He turned his head just enough to look at her. “I mean, it doesn't matter. The answer is yes.”   
     “We’re not done yet, you know,” she said, her voice sing-song.  
     Richie gave a disparaging laugh. "You're not done til your dead, right?"  
     There was a coffee table in front of the couch covered in white lines and stray shake, and George watched the room with transfixed awe. He was seeing without really seeing. These weren’t real things. He could just see needles piled around on the floor by one of the table legs. Even as he watched a stranger take a bump off the table, it stuck in his mind as some kind of scripted event. There was so much extraneous sound out of his field of vision, so many movements coming in and out of the line of sight allowed him by the narrow crack in the door, even Richie only half visible from here, George felt a compulsion to move in closer. Like someone trying to see around their TV screen during the slow-pan to the monster reveal, his morbid curiosity wanted to see all of it. He wanted to put himself in the scene just to see if it didn’t all evaporate right in front of him, the illusion disrupted, but whatever sense still clung to his mind froze him in place.  
      _No, Georgie, no, no, no, they’ll see you they’ll seeyouTHEY’LLSEEYOU, TURN AROUND._  
     George skittered back from the door, pushing away like it was about to detonate. Oh God he was losing his mind. The heavy air was suddenly constricting. It was seeping into his throat, and he was going to suffocate down here. Stumbling, he all but ran up the basement stairs and face first into the door, not bothering to stop, still carrying his momentum as he opened it and pushed through, back into light and sound and air.  
     He tried to make his way back to the kitchen, but his thoughts were untethered and his steps refused to keep straight. The number of people seemed to have tripled as he kept running into another body or another chair or another wall. He found the kitchen door and pushed it open to light. He didn’t give himself time to adjust, just pushing through, ignoring the voices or questions that followed him, and left through the back door at the other end of the kitchen. The cold bite of the air hit his face, bringing a little clarity of the moment snapping back, if only for a second. There were still too many people out here. He crossed the porch to the stairs as quickly as he could, not sparing anyone a look. He just wanted this night to be over. The flowerbeds wrapped around the bottom of the house were set just far enough forward for a small body to fit behind if they wanted to. George crawled behind the bushes with the vague sense that he should be feeling ridiculous right now, but he was just too tired to care. He leaned back against the porch’s raised wood-paneling and curled his knees up to his chest. He just needed a minute away from everything. From his brain that felt like it had become untethered and was shaking free in every direction, leaving the shell of his body back there in the dirt. From this whole world that Bill had dragged him into.  
     He dropped his forehead to his knees and pulled himself in tighter.  
     No. He wasn’t any more dragged into this than been invited to walk through a newly opened door. He’d spent years watching through the windows; he knew he wasn’t as ignorant as he wanted to believe. He’d wanted this.   
     This place in the dirt.  
     This headache.  
     Everything was spinning and he wanted off. But right now he just needed a minute. He closed his eyes — just a minute.

————————————

     Richie Tozier’s history with Patrick Hockstetter was — complicated.  
     Richie didn’t like the guy by any stretch. It was hard to imagine that anyone would willingly find themselves flocking after the guy. But damn if they didn’t. After Henry Bowers’s run-in with the law back during the older boys’ senior year — brought on by his father’s run-in with the wrong end of Henry’s knife; a long-festering teenage rage that only got worse with time and finally snapped loose — the then Bowers gang seemed to naturally hand over the reigns of leadership to the most willing taker among them. Patrick was a lot like Bill in that regard, taking advantage of every given opportunity to overtake and conquer. And also like Bill, Richie always found himself strung along not far behind. They were interesting. That was what Richie always told himself — he wanted to be there to see what they did next. He wanted to be part of it. They were chaos in the making, and he needed chaos for anything in this goddamn world to make sense.  
But his real interest in them lied in their differences. To put it simply: there was a greater system at play in the universe — Bill bent it to his will; Patrick stepped beyond it. The rules didn’t apply to Patrick Hockstetter. He was what you got when you glitched out the arcade machine and started walking off the boundaries of the level, when the characters got all fucked up and lost their preset dialogue boxes. Nothing was real when he was around — nothing but him. He broke the world, showed you the inside, then brought it back together just to make you sit there and stare at it, trying to make it ever look the same again.  
     The first few times had been a kind of reprieve for Richie. Patrick wasn’t a fucking ray of sunshine in the dark or anything, but it was like the drill sergeant had stepped out of the room and the renegade rebel snuck in after him, telling you fuck these people and fuck the system, there are no rules. Life is short. Life is meaningless. Fuck, get high, and die.  
     These words usually sang like a mantra in Richie’s head. A promise, something to run towards. But they were different now, in this place. Sinister and frantic, a warning, his focus on it more distraction from where he was than an affirmation. He knew five minutes in whatever den Patrick managed to carve out he’d be floating easy. He’d be too far gone to care about anything. It was getting himself to that den that had been the hard part. Making his legs move, bearing the sensation of Patrick’s arm resting against the skin of his neck. Richie had been in this dank basement room before. Not this room, specifically, but after so long they all blurred into the same liminal space, even if the minor details interchanged. It wasn’t always coke, it wasn’t always at some house party surrounded by strangers, some girl he never got the name of and would never remember the face of sitting beside him. He wasn’t sure when she’d appeared, but she kept shoving things down his throat every time he came up from a line, his head pounding a million miles a minute. She tipped his chin with her slim fingers until their eyes met, and he wondered again why she was even here. Patrick had put her here, clearly, but he didn’t understand why. Patrick was the only constant in all these spaces, the one putting all his toys exactly where he wanted them, controlling every facet of the space and the people hovering around in it. Everything was an experiment. A chance to “just see what happens.” But Patrick had barely moved from Richie’s peripheral since they got here. He’d taken his hands of situation, like he wanted nothing to do with it anymore. Almost like it wasn’t worth his time.  
     Whatever Richie was feeling, whatever was crawling under his skin, biting and biting and biting, he wanted it gone. He could feel himself slipping back into a familiar place and he might have screamed if he thought it made any difference. These highs used to be good. They used to be what he was running to when he slipped out from under Bill’s hold. Now they were the closest he’d ever come to believing in hell.  
     With her other hand, the girl slid something else into Richie’s impossibly dry mouth. Another unnamed pill. He almost couldn’t swallow it. She brought herself down as a chaser, pushing his mouth to his so he couldn’t spit it out either. He just let it ride, pulling this nameless, faceless girl closer until she was practically in his lap.  
     She had to strain to pull away. “Jesus, I can’t fucking breathe,” she rasped, her lips still close enough to brush against his.  
     “There are worse ways to go.”  
     “Don’t sell yourself so short.”  
     He pulled her back in, his every muscle and nerve working on impulse and reaction. He knew he was holding her too tight, too long. Maybe he could pull her down with him and he wouldn’t drown alone. Maybe she deserved hell, too.  
     No matter how tightly he held on, Richie knew she’d be gone when he woke up. They’d all be gone. And he hated her for it.  
     He heard Beverly shouting his name from somewhere too far away for him to ever reach. It was the voice of a ghost, something long gone but still trying to push through.  
      _Holy fuck. Oh God. Don’t be dead. Please, God, don’t be dead, Richie. Fuck. Hey. HEY! You, yeah. Don’t just look at him like that. DO SOMETHING._   
     He could almost see her standing over him where he laid in his front yard, the sun so bright behind her she was barely more than a shadow.  
      _Don’t tell Eddie._ He had tried to beg her then, but he couldn’t remember how to make the words come out. She was talking to someone, motioning them over.   
      _He can’t see me like this. He can’t see me die. Eddie would be so pissed off if I died._  
    “Who’s Eddie?”  
    The world slipped out from under Richie then: The couch, the room, Patrick and his half-lidded eyes — and the girl along with them. He didn’t hold her tight enough.


End file.
